Faculty Profiles

Steven M. Wasserstrom is The Moe and Izetta Tonkon Professor of Judaic Studies and the Humanities at Reed College in Portland Oregon, where he has taught since 1987. Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam, published by Princeton University Press in 1995, was given the Award for Excellence in Historical Studies from the American Academy of Religion. Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos was published by Princeton University Press in 1999. A session of the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting was devoted to it in Boston, 1999; Papers from the panel are published in Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Oxford University Press) volume 69/2 (2001), including the author’s response: “Response: Final Note to Significance Seekers,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69/2 (2001) pp. 461-465. “The Fullness of Time”: Poems by Gershom Scholem, selected, edited and introduced by Steven M. Wasserstrom, translated by Richard Sieburth (Ibis Editions: Jerusalem, 2003) is the first edition of the poetry of the great Kabbalah scholar, Gershom Scholem. A conference marking the publication of this book was held at the University of Chicago, February 2004. As second edition, under the title Greetings from Angelus was published by Archipelago Books in 2018. All Religion Is Inter-religion: Engaging the Work of Steven M. Wasserstrom (Bloomsbury USA Academic, edited by Paul Robertson and Kambiz Ghaneabassiri) appeared in 2019. Professor Wasserstrom has lectured at universities throughout the United States, including Harvard University, the University of Chicago, Princeton University, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as at the major universities of Israel and Canada. He has also lectured and consulted in Brazil, Morocco, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Holland and Great Britain. For the school year 2000-2001 he was an invited Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, in a research team devoted to the subject “Millennial Pursuits: Apocalyptic Traditions and Expectations of the End Among Medieval Jews and Their Neighbors.” He served as the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Distinguished Visiting Professor in Judaic Studies at the College of William and Mary, as an Invited Scholar at the Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung in Berlin, and as a member of the Working Group on Messianism, The Tikvah Project on Jewish Thought, Princeton University.