Tarek El-Ariss & Susannah Heschel

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on the history of Jewish and Protestant religious thought in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and she has brought post-colonial theory and feminist theory to her analyses. She is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany; and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung, as well as several edited volumes, including Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism and Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust. Forthcoming this year are a monograph written with Sarah Imhoff, Jewish Studies and the Woman Question, and a co-edited volume, New Paths: Essays in Honor of Professor Elliot Wolfson, with Glenn Dynner and Shaul Magid. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, she has held fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Maimonides Institute in Hamburg, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.

Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. Born and raised in Beirut during the Civil War (1975-1990) and trained in philosophy and literary and cultural studies at the American University of Beirut, Rochester, and Cornell. He works across disciplines and languages to examine questions of displacement, war, and community. His research interests include Arabic literature, culture, and the arts; new media and digital humanities; modernity studies, travel writing, and the war novel; and 18th-century French philosophy and literature. He has written about disoriented travelers, outcasts, queers, hackers, and characters with complicated relations to home. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, and Choice. Following the attacks of Oct 7, Tarek and his Dartmouth colleagues organized a widely publicized series of forums to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and educate students and the public on the issue. In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his forthcoming book, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War.