Jay Geller
Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Culture and Religious Studies

B.A. (Wesleyan 1975)
A.M., Ph.D. (Duke, 1980, 1985)

Email: jay.geller@Vanderbilt.edu

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

An inveterate (not Confederate) Yankee fan, "old original" Jay Geller is Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt University Department of Religious Studies. He has also taught at the University of Vienna, Bryn Mawr College, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Swarthmore College, and Wesleyan University. In 2001 he was the Fulbright/Sigmund Freud Society Visiting Scholar in Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna); he has also received DAAD, ACLS, CCACC (Rutgers), ATS fellowships and participated in 2 NEH Summer Seminars (on Freud and on Jewish Cultural Studies). He has published numerous articles on Freud's Jewish identity, in particular, and on the relationship between antisemitism and modern European Jewish identity formation, in general. More recently, his work has focussed on the Shoah and film. His On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions appeared in Fall 2007 from Fordham University Press. Currently, he is completing a companion manuscript that includes chapters on Levin Varnahgen, Heine, Marx, Nordau, Schreber, Kafka (inter alia) entitled Persistent Contact: Modernity and the Embodiment of Jewish Identity, also for Fordham. He had earlier coedited Reading Freud's Reading and a special issue of American Imago on "Postmemories of the Holocaust."