Faculty

Julia Phillips Cohen
Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish History
Assistant Professor of History

PhD Stanford University, 2008

Jewish History, History of the Ottoman Empire, Urban History, Inter-Communal Relations in the Modern Mediterranean, Judeo-Spanish (Sephardi) History, Jews in Islamic Lands

Telephone: 615-322-6202
Email: julia.p.cohen@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: summer - no office hours
Office: 215 Benson Hall

Julia Phillips Cohen is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Jewish Studies and the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. Her book Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013), focuses on the imperial loyalties and local identities of Ottoman Jews in different urban centers of the eastern Mediterranean. She has received a number of grants to support her work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Institute for Turkish Studies and the American Research Institute in Turkey. Most recently, she has received a fellowship at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, of the University of Pennsylvania, for spring semester 2012.

Her publications include "Between Civic and Islamic Ottomanism: Jewish Imperial Citizenship in the Hamidian Era," International Journal of Middle East Studies 44: 2 (May 2012), "Halal and Kosher: Jews and Muslims as Political and Economic Allies," AJS Perspectives (Spring 2012), "Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History," Jewish Quarterly Review 100:3 (Summer 2010) (with Sarah Abrevaya Stein), and “Conceptions rivales du patriotism ottoman : les célébrations juives de 1892" in Esther Benbassa, ed. Itinéraires Sépharades (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010).

Cohen received her BA in Spanish and History from the University of California, Davis, and pursued her PhD in Modern Jewish History at Stanford University. Her teaching interests include a variety of topics in modern Jewish history, the comparative urban histories of Europe and the Middle East, Jewish-Muslim relations and the modern Ottoman Empire.