Sean Bortz

Sean Bortz is a doctoral candidate studying late medieval and Reformation England with an emphasis on religion and politics. His dissertation, "Thinking with Jews: Jews and Judaism and the Struggle for Orthodoxy in Late Medieval and Reformation England," explores religious discourse between competing groups of Christians and how Jews and Judaism relate to the religious tensions between those groups. He presented a paper in November 2013 at the Southern Conference on British Studies on the confluence of heresy, orthodoxy and Jews and Judaism in the Book of Margery Kempe, as well as a paper on Reginald Pecock at Vanderbilt in February 2014. Sean was recently selected as a 2014 NEH Summer Scholar and attended a summer institute at Oxford, England entitled "Representations of the 'Other': Jews in Medieval England." The five-week program was held at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and directed by Professor Irven M. Resnick. He will be presenting a paper at the Southern Conference on British Studies in November 2014 which explores the English reformer John Bale and how Bale thinks about his religious opponents in categories related to Jews and Judaism. He is studying with Dr. Peter Lake.