Following his inaugural year on faculty in our department, Assistant Professor J. Rafael Balling has been awarded a Frankel Institute Fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. The Frankel is among academia’s most prestigious fellowships in the area of interdisciplinary Jewish Studies. Each year’s Fellows, who remain in residence at UM for the duration of the fellowship, work alongside Michigan faculty and scholars from across North America and the world on a core theme. Scholars for the 2024-2025 year have been gathered under the rubric of “Jewish/Queer/Trans.” According to the Fellowship’s website, “the ‘Jewish/Queer/Trans’ fellowship year will promote a tighter integration of queer/trans perspectives and methodologies into Jewish Studies, and contribute to the ongoing softening of boundaries between analyses focused on racial, sexual, or gendered difference.” Rafael will be joined in Ann Arbor by UW German Studies Affiliate Faculty Prof. Laurie Marhoefer (History), who is likewise a 2024-2025 Frankel Institute Fellow.
Prof. Balling, an expert in German Jewish and Yiddish literature, LGBTIQ+ narratives and (auto)biographical writing, will use the fellowship year to pursue his first book project. Says Rafael, “I am looking forward to working on my book manuscript (A Story Of Their Own: 20th-Century Jewish Trans Narratives) and a number of smaller solicited research projects, as well as using this fantastic opportunity to build new scholarly networks in and beyond the University of Michigan.” The book project “considers the role of storytelling in 20th-century Jewish trans narratives as a means to counter the dominant psychopathological framework of Western discourse on gender variance.” While he will be missed in Seattle, we wish Rafael a hearty Glückwunsch and mazal tov on this extraordinary opportunity!
-- Martin Schwartz