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SUMMARY:Book Launch: Mark Letteney – Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
DESCRIPTION:Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies as we celebrate the recent publication of SCJS faculty member and history professor Mark Letteney’s new book: Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration\, co-authored by Matthew D. C. Larsen. \nLetteney will be joined by Stroum Center faculty and history professor Joel Walker and classics professor Sarah Levin-Richardson to discuss the book\, unpack what role prisons played in ancient societies and how this history continues today\, and answer questions. Light refreshments will be provided before the talk and the book will be available for purchase. \nRegistration required: register here. \nAncient Mediterranean Incarceration examines spaces\, practices\, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts\, archaeological findings\, documentary evidence\, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social\, political\, and economic fabric of ancient societies. Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration traces a long history of carceral practices\, considering ways in which the institution of prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class\, ethnicity\, gender\, and imperialism. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the imprisoned\, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for a new historical consciousness around contemporary practices of incarceration. \n\nWhat’s at stake in this study is our picture of history itself\, and of how incommensurable one period truly is with another. The odd effect of Larsen and Letteney’s study is to make the continuities more vivid to us than the breaks. Suffering and cruelty\, after all\, are constants—remarkably consistent in their distribution throughout time. \nEven against that darker kind of universalism\, however\, some light manages to break through. What lingers with us after reading this book is not so much the sense of an abstract argument won or lost as a helpless awareness of the endless\, needless suffering of humanity. The idea of a common humanity\, in this very stakesy view\, is not an invention that separates us from the ancients but an inheritance that connects us to them. It’s what makes the dialogue of the dead a conversation among the living.  – Adam Gopnik\, The New Yorker \n\nMark Letteney\, Department of History at the University of Washington\, is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration\, book history\, and the archaeology of military occupation. He holds the Carol Thomas Endowed Professorship in Ancient History\, and is also a faculty member of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and the Comparative Religion Program. \nThis event is being co-sponsored by UW’s Department of History.
URL:https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/event/book-launch-mark-letteney-ancient-mediterranean-incarceration/
LOCATION:Kane Hall 225\, UW Campus\, 4069 Spokane Lane\, Seattle\, WA\, 98105\, United States
CATEGORIES:Academic Lectures
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ORGANIZER;CN="Stroum Center for Jewish Studies":MAILTO:jewishst@uw.edu
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260128T163000
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SUMMARY:Public Lecture: Umbrella Sky – Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature
DESCRIPTION:Join us for a talk on Miriam Udel’s new book Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature\, short-listed for the 2025 National Jewish Book Awards. \nRegistration required. Register here. \nAround the turn of the twentieth century\, a group of Yiddish-speaking educators\, authors\, and cultural leaders undertook a bold project: creating a corpus of nearly one thousand books and several periodicals\, which flourished in conjunction with the secular Yiddish school systems that spanned the globe in the 1920s and 30s. These vibrant texts cut across continents and ideologies but shared in their creators’ overarching goal: to write into being a better world\, a shenere un besere velt—in a distinctively Yiddish key. The question of what a “better world” looks like is\, of course\, inextricably bound up in questions of political vision. Investigated as an archive\, the stories\, poems\, and plays written for children during the early twentieth century furnish a novel record of the movements—geographic and ideological—that made Ashkenazi Jewry fully modern. \nThis event is co-sponsored by UW’s Slavic Languages and Literatures. Book sales\, by Third Place Books\, and book signing will follow the event. \nMiriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature\, both from Harvard University and was ordained in 2019 at Yeshivat Maharat. Udel is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press)\, winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. She is the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press\, 2020)\, winner of the Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Udel’s translation of Chaver Paver’s 1935 story collection Labzik: Tales of a Clever Pup will appear in 2026 with SUNY Press. Last October\, Princeton published her critical study Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature. Her research looks to children’s literature and culture as a powerful force for political formation and a resource for the intergenerational transmission of culture\, values\, and ideology. She is working on a new project with the working title Reading Together for Democracy.
URL:https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/event/book-talk-umbrella-sky-modern-jewish-worldmaking/
LOCATION:HUB 145\, UW Campus\, 4001 E Stevens Way NE\, Seattle\, WA\, 98195\, United States
CATEGORIES:Academic Lectures
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ORGANIZER;CN="Stroum Center for Jewish Studies":MAILTO:jewishst@uw.edu
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