Assistant Professor and Teller Family Chair in Jewish History, History
School of Humanities

Sephardic History; Ottoman Empire; History of Ethnography and Anthropology; Entanglements of Race and Religion

My research focuses on the history, politics, and ethics of knowledge production and representation among Sephardic communities in the late Ottoman Empire. My first book project, "Ethnographic Afterlives: Sephardic Jews and the Making of Difference in the Late Ottoman World" examines how Jewish writers and thinkers produced, circulated, and mobilized ethnographic and racialized knowledge in service of different visions of reform. Against the backdrop of expanding empires, the rise of anthropology, and shifting notions of race, I consider how Ottoman Sephardic Jews used ethnographic writing in attempts to position themselves within an emergent and expanding global racial hierarchy.

I have also worked on the history of Jewish ethnography beyond the Ottoman Empire and the creation of ethnographic missions to communities deemed “lost tribes” in Ethiopia and China.

New York Public Library, Long-Term Fellowship (2023-2024)
Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2022-2023)
U.S. Dept. of Education, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, Hebrew (2021-2022)
UCLA Collegium of University Teaching Fellowship (2021-2022)
Mellon Foundation, Fellowship for the Study of Minorities in the Middle East (2020-2021)
UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies, Skirball Fellowship in Modern Jewish Culture (2020-2021)
Institute for Turkish Studies, Summer Language Study Grant for Ottoman Turkish (2020)
Wexner Foundation, Wexner Graduate Fellowship (2017-2021)

Dr. Rachel Baron-Bloch earned a BA/MA in Linguistic Anthropology from New York University (2010), completed a dual-degree MA in Jewish History and Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary (2017), and received her PhD from UCLA in History (2023). She has worked on numerous public history projects including oral history archives, educational programming, and exhibits for the Tenement Museum and the Center for Jewish History in New York, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and the Leve Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA. She joins the UCI History Department from Columbia University, where she served as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar.

“The Reformist Ethnographic: Sephardic Hilula Narratives from Nineteenth-Century Palestine,” Studies in Travel Writing (forthcoming).

“Drawing the Jewish Propter Nos:” Nineteenth-Century Missions and the Making of Race,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (forthcoming).

“The Racial Politics of the Alliance Israélite Universelle,” Jewish Quarterly Review 114.1 (winter 2024): 109-140.

“Mapping the Racial Terrain of Ottoman Sephardic Travelogues,” Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 9 (1), Spring 2022, 305-311. (under Rachel Smith)

Translation: “Shorn of Her Curls - Internment in Giado Through a Young Girl’s Eyes” and “A Yom Kippur Prayer for Tunisian Victims of the Third Reich," (translated from Hebrew) in Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, eds., Wartime North Africa: Jews, Muslims, and Christians Under Occupation, Race Laws, and Internment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=7280

Last updated
09/27/2024