Rivka Feldhay, who heads the research project on the migration of knowledge, teaches the history of science and ideas at Tel Aviv University. Her areas of research and teaching are: knowledge and faith in the early modern era, intellectual currents in the Renaissance, Copernicus and Galileo in their own context, science education in Catholic Europe, and the culture of the Baroque and the New Science. Professor Feldhay has served as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (1987-8); the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (1998-9); the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna (1994); the Dibner Institute at MIT (1995); the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (1997; 2005-6); and the Collegium Helveticum of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) (2001). Between the years 1997-2003 she headed the Cohn Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas in Tel Aviv University. Between the years 1994-1998 she led a research project titled “Europe and the Middle East: Key Political Concepts in a Cultural Dialogue” at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and in association with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin. In 2004-2006 she ran the research group on “Russians in Israel” at Van Leer. Among her major publications are:
Books: R. Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? Cambridge University Press 1995 (303 pp.) [reprint 1999]
E. Etkes & R. Feldhay (eds.with introduction ), Education and History: Cultural and Political Contexts, , The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History: Jerusalem 1998 (in Hebrew)
Articles: R. Feldhay, “The use and abuse of mathematical entities: Galileo and the Jesuits revisited”, in P. Machamer (ed.), A Companion to Galileo, Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 80-146
R. Feldhay, “Religion”, in K. Park and L. Daston (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Cambridge University Press 2006, pp. 727-755
R. Feldhay, “On Wonderful Machines: The Transmission of Mechanical Knowledge by Jesuits” Science and Education, Volume 15, Numbers 2-4, March 2006, pp. 151-172.
R. Feldhay, “Authority, Political Theology, and the Politics of Knowledge in the Transition from Medieval to Early Modern Catholicism”, Social Research, Vol 73, No 4: Winter 2006, pp. 1065-1092
R. Feldhay, “Der Fall Galilei: Der damalige Konflict zwischen Glauben und Wissen aus heutiger Sicht”, in Sterne und Weltraum, (2009) 6:44-53
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Keren Abbou Hershkovits completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University. Her dissertation, written under the supervision of Dr. Nimrod Hurvitz, is titled “Historiography of Science in Arabic Texts, Tenth-Fourteenth Centuries.” It deals with the attitudes of scholars toward scientific knowledge and with the position of scientific knowledge vis-à-vis other branches of knowledge. Abbou Hershkovits is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, where she is affiliated with the “Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Cultures” research group. She is studying the consolidation of a circle of physicians under the Abbasids, and the social and political process that led to the dominance of Galenism over other contemporary medical systems. Her research at The Minerva Humanities Center will explore the Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldūn and the origins of his approach to science, and will examine how scientific theories, especially climatology, were changed once transmitted and translated into Arabic.
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Alexander Boxer received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2009. His research has appeared in the journals Nature Physics and Review of Scientific Instruments. Boxer has a wide variety of interests; he holds a bachelor’s degree in classical languages from Yale (2001) and a master’s degree in the history of science from Oxford (2002). At present he is writing another doctoral thesis, in the history of science, conducted under the auspices of Professor Rivka Feldhay at Tel Aviv University. His current research, which will also be the focus of his work at The Minerva Humanities Center, involves the Steganographia of Trithemius, a cryptographic manual from 1500.
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Michal Brosh Meltzer holds an LL.B from The College of Management in Israel and is a master’s student at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Her research reexamines Cartesian dualism in light of Descartes’ last essay, “Les Passions de l’Âme”.
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Raz Chen Morris holds an M.A. (cum laude, in the history of medieval and Renaissance science) and a Ph.D. (2001) from Tel Aviv University. His undergraduate degree is from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Throughout his studies Morris taught at several high schools and colleges, among them The Arts and Science High School in Jerusalem, Alma Hebrew College in Tel Aviv, The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and Seminar Hakibbutzim. Today Morris is a lecturer in the graduate program of Science, Technology and Society at Bar-Ilan University. He has published widely on Renaissance science, concentrating on Kepler’s optics. His major publications to date are: “Optics, Imagination, and the Construction of Scientific Observation in Kepler’s New Science”, The Monist (2001) 84, 4:453-486; “Shadows of Instruction: Optics and Classical Authorities in Kepler’s Somnium”, Journal for the History of Ideas (2005) 66, 2:223-243; and “From Emblems to Diagrams: Kepler’s New Pictorial Language of Scientific Representation”, Renaissance Quarterly (2009) 62, 1:134-170. His research at The Minerva Humanities Center, entitled “Vision Contested”, examines the disputes over visual experience in the early stages of the New Science. Morris is married and has three children.
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Leigh Chipman received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. (2006) from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a Kreitman postdoctoral fellow at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2007-2008). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Minerva Humanities Center. After writing her M.A. on the stories surrounding the creation of Adam in Islam and Judaism, she turned to the field of history of medicine. A revised version of her dissertation, title The World of Pharmacy and Pharmacists in Mamlūk Cairo, is forthcoming from Brill. Leigh’s research interests are the social and intellectual history of medicine and science in the Islamicate world. At the Minerva Humanities Center she will study forms of secret writing (codes, ciphers, and alchemical writings) in the late medieval and early modern Middle East.
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Tamar Cholcman specializes in Renaissance and Baroque Art of the Netherlands and the Iberian Peninsula. Her main field of research is Ephemeral Art in the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She studied at Tel Aviv University, The Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, and the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Munich. In 2006 she received her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University. Dr. Cholcman was granted the Rottenstreich Scholarship for Outstanding Doctoral Students in Humanities and the Dan David Prize Scholarship for Young Researchers. Her publications discuss aspects of civic propaganda and ceremony as well as the theoretical problems of Ephemeral Art and its realization in the written text. Her current work explores the contribution and influence of merchants to the expansion of Ephemeral Art throughout Europe and the New World. Cholcman teaches at Tel Aviv University and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
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Michael Elazar, formerly an aeronautical engineer, scientific editor of Hed-Artzi/Ma’ariv Publishing House, and Editor-in-Chief of Galileo: Israeli Periodical on Science and Thought, received a Master’s degree (1999) and a Ph.D. degree (2010) from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. His M.A. thesis discussed the “Theory of Configurations” formulated by the philosopher and theologian Nicole Oresme (1320-1382). His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Honoré Fabri and the Concept of Impetus: A Bridge between Paradigms”, was supervised by Professor Rivka Feldhay and focused on the Jesuit philosopher and mathematician Honoré Fabri (1608-1688). Elazar continues his research into seventeenth-century Jesuit physics as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He also serves as an assistant editor of the Cambridge Journal Science in Context.
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Ofer Elior holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and History and a M.A. in History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, both from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His Ph.D. dissertation (2011) centers on Ruah Hen, an anonymous Hebrew philosophical-scientific treatise, composed in the thirteenth century, probably in Provençe. The dissertation studies the contents of Ruah Hen, in light of the specific intellectual and cultural context in which it was written. In addition, the dissertation discusses Ruah Hen’s transmission and appropriation in several other cultural environments of European Jewry. Dr. Elior’s primary research project deals with the Jewish scientific canon in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The project attempts to identify the treatises which together constituted this canon, and examines the main aspects of their use as authoritative texts in the learning of science. Other research interests include the music of the spheres in the commentary tradition on Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, and the concept of corporeal form in medieval Jewish thought.
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Asaf Goldschmidt is a senior lecturer at the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University. He teaches and writes about Chinese medicine, its history, philosophy and social context. His research focuses on the transformations of Chinese medicine during the Song dynasty; the imperial government’s impact on medical knowledge and practice; and the status of physicians during this era. His book, titled The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty 960–1200, was recently published by Routledge as part of the Needham Research Institute Series. His most recent research concerns the history of the Imperial Pharmacy as an imperial medical institution with public health bearing, and the history of the clinical encounter during the Song-Yuan period. At The Minerva Humanities Center he studies the temporal transmission of medical knowledge during the Song dynasty (960-1276).
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Reut Harari is an M.A. student in the History Department at Tel-Aviv University. Her research deals with the history of medicine in Japan. She earned her B.A. (summa cum laude) from TAU’s History and East Asian Departments. During her undergraduate studies, she studied also at VIU University in Venice. Harari was exposed to Japanese culture from an early age and lived in Japan for two and a half years. During that time, she studied Japanese intensively and worked for about a year in the upper house of the Japanese Parliament. Her interaction with Japan continues in her academic research, professional activities, and interpersonal relations. Her interest in the history of medicine stems from a semester of medical studies. In her work with the Migration of Knowledge research group Harari will focus on the story of Hanaoka Seishu, a Japanese physician, as a case study of the Japanese encounter with Western medical knowledge in the early modern period.
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Gal Herz is a graduate of The Open University and Alma College. He wrote his M.A. thesis on theology and politics in Baruch Kurzweil’s thought, and is now writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Karl Kraus’s language criticism. Alongside his academic work, Herz is involved in various projects that seek to combine critical theory and political activism. He is one of the founders of a center for bi-national thought. His research at The Minerva Humanities Center deals with the transfer of knowledge between aesthetics, theology, and politics in German Jewish thought at the turn of the twentieth century.
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Tzvi Langermann is a native New Englander. He earned his B.A. in history from Boston University and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University. Before joining the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University in 1997, he worked for many years cataloguing manuscripts at the Jewish National Library. At The Minerva Humanities Center Langermann leads the working group on the migration of knowledge in the eastern Mediterranean during the late medieval and early modern periods. His own project concerns Yosef Shlomo Delmediggo and the sciences of his day. Langermann is married and has three children.
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Ivor Ludlam teaches ancient Greek and Latin in the Foreign Languages Department at The University of Haifa. His research focuses on analyzing Platonic dialogues as philosophical dramas and reconstructing Stoic philosophy. His research at The Humanities Center examines the transmission of the concept of ‘determinism’ from the ancient world to the seventeenth century.
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Rony Weinstein completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Jewish History at The Hebrew University (1995). In 2000-2001 he was a full fellow at The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti, Florence). In recent years he was a research fellow at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at Pisa University. His project at The Minerva Humanities Center examines Jewish Encyclopedias during the early modern period as indicators of changing conceptions of knowledge.
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Nathaniel Wolloch received his Ph.D. from the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1998). He has taught at various academic institutions in Israel. His research centers on the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the history of attitudes toward animals and nature in general, the history of historiography and the history of the Enlightenment. He has published articles in various academic journals, and has written two books: Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture (Humanity Books, 2006); History and Nature in the Enlightenment: Praise of the Mastery of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Historical Literature (Ashgate, 2011). His research at The Minerva Humanities Center deals with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions regarding the transmission of cultural knowledge between various peoples.
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Hanan Yoran completed his B.Sc. in mathematics and computer sciences at The Hebrew University and his Ph.D. at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. He is now a lecturer in the Department of General History at Ben-Gurion University. His field of research is early modern intellectual and cultural history, specifically Renaissance Humanism. His book on the construction of the identity of the universal intellectual by the Erasmian Humanists will be published in 2010. The subject of his research at The Minerva Humanities Center is “Renaissance Humanism and Modernity: The Rootless Intellectual and the Groundlessness of Knowledge”.
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Ido Yavetz teaches at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, at Tel Aviv University. He completed his undergraduate studies in physics at TAU and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the Cohn Institute. His doctoral thesis was on the British physicist Oliver Heaviside, on whom he also later published the book From Obscurity to Enigma: The Work of Oliver Heaviside, 1872-1889 (Birkhäuser, 1995). Yavetz’s main areas of research are the history of classical physics and the history of astronomy. His work also deals with the annals of technology and with the history of the study of insects in the nineteenth century. At The Minerva Humanities Center Yavetz heads a research group that studies the transfer of knowledge and generation of new ideas in Galileo’s physics.
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Sharon Zaidis-Felous holds a B.A. in business administration (specializing in marketing and financing) and an M.A. from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. The topic of her research is the “sciencability” of Ballet – presentation and symbolism in dance in the Renaissance and Baroque eras. It traces the development of the geometric ballet and examines the structure of these ballets as well as their use of the body as a language figure. Zaidis-Felous is a professional choreographer and the manager of two dance schools – “Studio Shape” in Kfar Saba and in Hod Hasharon. She sits on the board of “The Israeli Dance Club” and is a member of the Bat-Sheva Dance Company Forum for Dance Teachers.
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Gur Zak is a lecturer in the Department of General and Comparative Literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. from The Centre for Medieval Studies at The University of Toronto in 2008. His Book Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self is forthcoming from the Cambridge University Press. His research at The Minerva Humanities Center concerns the spiritual implications of the revival of antiquity in the Renaissance.
