The Program in Jewish Studies at Rice is delighted to welcome our new Samuel W. and Goldye Marian Spain Postdoctoral Fellow Daniella Farah. Daniella will complete her PhD in Jewish History at Stanford University this summer and will join us in fall 2021. Her work is situated at the intersection of Modern Jewish History, Education History, Middle Eastern History, and Transnational Studies. Specifically, she works on the socio-cultural histories of the Jews of the modern Middle East, with a focus on Iran and Turkey.
Daniella works in many language traditions, including Persian, Judeo-Persian, Hebrew, French, and English. In her doctoral dissertation, “Forming Iranian Jewish Identities: Education, National Belonging, the Jewish Press, and Integration, 1945-1981,” in which she employs an extensive range of archival and printed materials, as well as oral histories, Daniella demonstrates how Jews integrated into the broader non-Jewish Iranian polity and made claims of belonging to the burgeoning nation-state.
Daniella is a recipient of the 2021 New Voices in Jewish Studies Award at Columbia and Fordham Universities. Her article, “‘The school is the link between the Jewish community and the surrounding milieu’: Education and the Jews of Iran from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s,” was published in 2021 in the journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
"We are thrilled that Daniella will join our Jewish Studies team at Rice this Fall," says Matthias Henze, the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Hebrew Bible and director of Rice's Program in Jewish Studies. "With her great energy and expertise in areas that we currently don't cover at Rice, Daniella will bring much to our community. Both students and faculty will be greatly enriched."