We are delighted to invite you to this year’s Works In Progress Group in Jewish Studies; as is our custom, we will meet during the AJS Annual Meeting **in person**, this year on Tuesday, December 21, from 3:00-4:30pm.

This session is an informal, highly collegial gathering where AJS participants workshop two pre-distributed papers. All are welcome. We have met each year at the AJS for 20 years. We are proud to provide a space that combines serious intellectual exchange with a warm, laid-back atmosphere that can be particularly inviting for junior scholars or first-time attendees of the conference.

If you are able to join us this year, please RSVP by filling out this form by Sunday, Dec. 5th. We will send the papers out to those who have RSVPed. The session is open to anyone who will be attending the AJS conference.

Our presenters for the 2021 AJS meeting are Ayelet Brinn, Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and Brendan Goldman, the Hazel D. Cole Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington. Brinn will share a paper entitled “‘Women and Men Who are Like Women’: Female Pseudonyms in the Interwar American Yiddish Press.” Goldman’s paper is entitled “‘[The Jews’] Hands Shall be Shackled and They Shall be Cursed’ (Quran 5.64): Carceral State Logic and its Non-Muslim Victims in Medieval Egypt.” Both papers represent cutting-edge research in their respective fields, and exemplify the disciplinary diversity of the Works-in-Progress group.

We hope that you will be able to join us for these excellent papers, and also to celebrate two decades of the workshop.

Best wishes,

Jordan Katz (jordankatz@umass.edu)
Jason Lustig (jlustig@austin.utexas.edu)