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Syracuse University |
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Linda Shires |
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Linda M. Shires is a Professor of English at Syracuse University. Her main interests are in the discipline of 19th century British literature and Jewish studies. Her most recent book, Coming Home: A Woman’s Story of Conversion to Judaism, is an academic memoir using her conversion to Judaism as a window to explore important issues in the religion today such as women and Judaism, difficulties such as faith after the Holocaust, and connections between Torah and modern philosophy. In addition, Shires is working on two other books, Victorian Perspectives and Victorian Fame: The Transformation of Authorship in the 19th Century. Shires teaches courses in Gender and the Bible and in Representations of the Holocaust. In her Holocaust course, which she will teach again when she returns to campus in 2007-08 from an extended Research Leave, she wants students to understand reception histories and the politics of forms. She is eager for them to learn how a major historical event is processed through different discourses and why some dominate over others at particular historical moments. Looking closely at the 1950s, the 1980s, and the late 1990s to the present, students study museums, memoirs, varied attitudes towards major figures, kinds of films, literature, art, place, monuments, and personal testimony by people famous and not famous, by perpetrators, bystanders, and victims. Because her husband is a Holocaust refugee from Europe who grew up in South America, she also feels a strong commitment to educating students about the Holocaust. Shires has won two teaching awards at Syracuse and considers this course one of her most successful. |
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Ph.D. Princeton University |
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Recent News:
Professor Linda Shires will give the Dvar Torah for Parshiyot Terumah; Vayakhel/Pekudei; Acharei Mot/Kedoshim; and Behar/Behukotai at the Princeton University Hillel Conservative minyan this term while on leave. |
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