welcome

I am Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA.

Before joining the faculty of Mount Holyoke College in 2017, I spent nine years on the faculty of the Religion Department at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, MN. I held the Hazel D. Cole Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington and the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Post-doctoral Fellow in Judaic Studies at Yale University. I received my B.A. from Hampshire College and a Diploma in Jewish Studies from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Judaic Studies. I completed my doctorate in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University with a specialization in Modern Jewish Thought.

I am a 2024 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. I have also been awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Award, and a Wexner Graduate Fellowship. I have been a member of the American Academy for Jewish Research since 2024.

I was raised in Seattle, Washington, on the unceded, traditional land of the Coast Salish Peoples.