Rose Stair

I am broadly interested in how Jewish thinkers have conceived of the relationship between the religious traditions of the past and the idea of the modern present. I work on textual and visual materials together, and the relationships between them. I consider how thinkers express religious and philosophical ideas by drawing on the symbolism of lived experiences including age, gender and parenthood.

During my DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford, I researched the Jewish cultural renaissance of early 20^th century Germany, analysing how religious narratives and symbolism found new forms in the period’s explosion of creativity. Prior to that, I studied at the University of Chicago.

My current research focuses on the German-Jewish Enlightenment, and its shifting conceptions of religious and intellectual authority. I am particularly interested in the relationships between different generations of thinkers, and the ways that these relationships shed light on broader questions about the status and authority of the past. 

I teach papers on Judaism and religion more broadly to students at Trinity College and in the Faculty of Theology and Religion. I supervise undergraduate dissertations on diverse topics relating to modern Judaism, with recent examples including Israeli cinema, Jewish Orthodox feminism and post-Holocaust thought.

My research interests include modern Jewish thought, visual art and poetry; gender and age studies; the relationship between Jewish and Christian thought; and the place of religion in modernity. I primarily focus on German Jewish thinkers from the Enlightenment to the early 20^th century but am also interested in Victorian Britain. 

‘Rosa Emma Salaman.’ Jewish Thinkers: Women and Gender-Marginalized Voices, Andrea Dara Cooper and Sarah Imhoff (eds). Wayne State University Press (forthcoming).

‘Space, Place and Gender in German Cultural Zionism: Paula Winkler on the Jewish Home.’ European Judaism, 57.1 (2024).

‘The Son and the Stranger: E. M. Lilien, Börries von Münchhausen, and Juda (1900).’ Studies on the Jewish Experience, Rachel Blumenthal, Daniel M. Herskowitz and Kerstin Mayerhofer (eds). Brill (2022).

‘The Woman’s Voice in Zionism: Disentangling Paula Winkler from Martin Buber.’ Religions, 9.12 (2018).

‘Gershom Scholem’s Critical Appropriation of Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Necessary Fiction of Historical Objectivity.’ PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien, 24 (2018).