News

Helen makhdoumian (23-26) receives acls fellowship

Helen Makhdoumian (CHPP Fellow and Department of English) has won a prestigious ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) fellowship for the next academic year. The ACLS announcement can be found here, and her project description can be found here. This is no small feat and we are very proud! 63 awardees across the US and in the humanities and social sciences were selected from a pool of over 2,000 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process and represent a broad range of institutions, fields, and career stages.

Re’ee Hagay’s (24-27) edited volume “critical jewish studies now: the relational politics of memory” soon to be published with springer press (June 2026)

This book is a multidisciplinary discussion of the possibility of Jewish critique, addressing intersections between Jewish Studies and critical paradigms in this moment of crisis. It traces how dominant modes of critique at times reproduce supersessionist and progress-oriented perspectives that foreclose critical possibilities offered by non-linear temporalities and only partially representable pasts. The contributors explore unexpected resonances between Mizrahi critique and Black thought, between the Palestinian and Jewish questions, and between Jewish practice and queer disruptions of traditionalist continuity, among others. It will be published in the series “Jewish Thought and Philosophy.”

Nat Rivkin’s (25-28) article “”Nevermore a Manly Shape Retaine”: Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Fairness, and Trans Femininity c. 1602,” recently published in College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 52:4 (Fall 2025)

In this article, Rivkin considers how Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus depicts feminizing transition as itself a function of early modern race-making. Rivkin argues that Beaumont’s epyllion dramatically reshapes those we now call assigned male at birth using the uneven and erotic vocabulary of early modern English racial hierarchies. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’s portrait of a fair hermaphrodite requires the disavowal of those who are not white and, in the case of Egypt, European. Rivkin maintains that Beaumont’s verse sutures a nymph to a boy only by continually signaling their racial sameness through anaphora and hyper-bole. That the poem so explicitly aligns feminizing transition with whiteness unsettles more recent, colorblind narratives of trans womanhood that can otherwise overlook the effortful makings of race. Beaumont’s blunt expressions of fairness many times over create what we may now recognize as a trans girl, softening a so-called “manly shape.”