Laurie E. Pearce is a Lecturer in Assyriology at Berkeley. Her areas of speciality include the economic and social history of Mesopotamia in the later part of the first millennium BCE. She studies legal texts written in Hellenistic Uruk: these texts form the basis of her project on Hellenistic Babylonia: Texts, Images and Names, which can […]
Filmmaker Susanna Zaraysky co-directed the film, Saved by Language, which tells the story of Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo whose knowledge of Ladino helped him survive the Holocaust. Susanna’s work aims to contextualize Ladino as an endangered Jewish language. The PopUp Exhibition will feature objects from The Magnes Collection including a Chumash (Pentateuch) […]
Jon is the Strategic Partnerships Director at Shift (formerly We Are What We Do) , a non-profit that allows a global community of individuals to share historical documents that matter to them. HistoryPin was created with initial funding support from Google (2011) and consists of a “web platform and a series of local volunteer led […]
Mary Elings is the Head of Digital Collections at The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on the nexus between preserving the past and also making it accessible to scholars and researchers in a plethora of digital platforms. Join us as she details exciting work being done by the Bancroft […]
Rabbi Yoel Kahn is the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth El in Berkeley. Kahn was ordained at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in 1985. He received his doctorate through the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, in 1999. Join Rabbi Kahn as he presents about the rare prayer books in The Magnes Collection.. […]
Erin Faigin is an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, and has been an Undergraduate Research Apprentice at the Magnes for two years since 2014. Through her knowledge of Yiddish she helped to create a flagship Digital Humanities project focusing on Yiddish books printed in California, held at The Magnes . Erin catalogued almost 100 volumes, […]
Greg Niemeyer is Associate Professor of Art Practice and the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media (bcnm.berkeley.edu). Born in Switzerland in 1967, he studied photography and classics, and received his MFA from Stanford, where he founded the Digital Art Center. At the Berkeley Center for New Media, Professor Niemeyer focuses on “the mediation […]
Martin Jay, the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at UC Berkeley, is a historian whose interests include European intellectual history in the 19th-20th centuries, Marxist theory, lying in politics, and visual discourse and culture. His presentation will center on a painting by the German Impressionist artist, Max Liebermann (1847–1935): The Flower Terrace in the Wannsee […]
Rachel Biale, born and raised in Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in Israel, is an author, clinical social worker, community organizer and educator, and parenting consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include Women and Jewish Law (Schocken, 1984), and three illustrated children’s books. Her current project, Lost and Found, is a historical novel based on the […]
Tomasz Tadeusz Koncewicz, a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Berkeley Law School, is a professor of European and comparative law, the director of the Department of European and Comparative Law of the University of Gdansk, Poland, and an advocate specializing in litigation before both supranational courts (European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice) and […]
Carla Shapreau, a member of the Berkeley Law faculty and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley, will present a case study in provenance research, reconstructing the creation and ownership of the painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Lavater und Lessing bei Moses Mendelssohn (1857), currently on display at The Magnes. Presented in […]
What can a 19th century painting of a library scene teach us about the problems and opportunities of building a new digital library? What's changed since 1856? What hasn't? In this talk, Brett Lockspeiser will use Oppenheim's painting of Mendelssohn's library as a springboard to explore questions around what a new digital library can and should […]
