Harvard Club of Toronto

 

                                                                                              

 

 

 

Prof Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and directs Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. Prof. Penslar is a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) and is also affiliated with Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

 

Prof Penslar's teaching reflects his interests in integrating Jewish history into global contexts. In addition to teaching courses in modern Jewish history and the history of Zionism and Israel, he teaches courses on nationalism, military history, and the history of emotions. He brings these themes into his General Education course on war and anti-war movements in the modern world.

 

He studied history at Stanford University, (B.A.), and at University of California, Berkeley, (M.A., and Ph. D.,) in Modern European History. Before coming to Harvard, Prof Penslar taught at Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford. He has taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). He has held research fellowships in Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research and is an honorary fellow of St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford.