Supervisor's Main Webpage

Academic Background

Prof. Dr. Sina Rauschenbach earned a degree in Mathematics in 1996, but afterwards switched to Philosophy and earned her doctoral degree in the field of medieval Jewish philosophy. In 2008-2009, she was awarded a fellowship of the Institute for Advance Study Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). From 2009-2014 she worked as research assistant at Konstanz University (Department of History) where she earned her habilitation in early modern history.  Since April 2014, she has been a Professor for Religious Studies and Jewish Thought at Potsdam University and a member of the Board of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg (ZJS).Her research approaches minor cosmopolitanisms through Jewish and converso networks in the early modern Atlantic world. Jews in colonial societies were both contributors to and victims of early modern processes of colonization which makes them interesting objects for new research at the crossroads of Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies. 

 Research Interests

• Jewish cosmopolitanisms
• early modern religious diasporas and networks
• representations of Jewish cosmopolitanisms in historical fiction
• cosmopolitanism as a topic of anti-Jewish/anti-Semitic discourse  

 Select Research Projects

• Jews in America: From the Beginnings until Independence (monograph).
• Trading Knowledge: Learned Merchants and Conceptions of the Globe in the 17th Century Dutch Republic (monograph).
• Sephardim and Ashkenazim: Jewish-Jewish Encounters in History and Literature (collected volume)

Select Publications

• Judentum für Christen: Vermittlung und Selbstbehauptung Menasseh ben Israels in den gelehrten Debatten des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012) (an English translation will be published with Lexington Books in 2019).
• Ed. (with Jonathan Schorsch), The Sephardic Atlantic: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Concepts (forthcoming, New York: Palgrave, 2019).
• The Empire Writes Back: David Nassy and Jewish Creole Historiography in Colonial Suriname, in The Sephardic Atlantic: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Concepts, ed. Sina Rauschenbach and Jonathan Schorsch (forthcoming; New York: Palgrave, 2019).
• Patriots at the Periphery: David Nassy, the French Revolution and the Emancipation of the Dutch Jews, in Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardi Communities, ed. Yosef Kaplan (forthcoming; Leiden: Brill, 2018).