Arthur Kiron is the Schottenstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections at the University of Pennsyvlania Libraries and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of History in Penn’s History Department. He manages and develops the Judaic collections throughout the Penn Libraries system and supervises the Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Library. He is the Director of the Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah Project http://leeser.library.upenn.edu/agproject.php and co-Director of the Scribes of the Cairo Genizah Project: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/judaicadh/scribes-of-the-cairo-geniza . He oversees the Penn Libraries’ Judaica programs of education and outreach, such as exhibits, concerts, workshops, as well as national and international partnerships to digitize significant collections of Judaica. His areas of subject specialization are in Atlantic Jewish history, the history of the Jewish book, and Judaica Digital Humanities.
Kiron is the editor of Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History: The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica (2014), recipient of the Arline Custer Memorial Award. Among his numerous publications related to his research interests are: “Cutting and Pasting: Interpreting the Victorian Scrapbook Practices of Sabato Morais,” For the Sake of Learning: essays in honor of Anthony Grafton. Edited by Ann Blair and Anja Goeing (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 642-659; “Heralds of Duty: The Sephardic Italian Jewish Theological Seminary of Sabato Morais” Jewish Quarterly Review vol. 105, no. 2 (Spring 2015), pp. 206-249; “Curating Judaica in a Digital Age” in Taking Note: Scholars and Scholarship at The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1993-2014 (Philadelphia: Herbert D. Katz Center Publication, 2014), pp. 30-33; “A Renaissance of Jewish Readers in Victorian Philadelphia,” in Leah Levitz Fishbane and Eitan P. Fishbane, Jewish Renaissance and Revival: Essays in Memory of Leah Levitz Fishbane (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), pp. 71-110; "An Atlantic Jewish Republic of Letters?," Jewish History vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring 2006); La Casa editrice Belforte e l'arte della stampa in Ladino - The Belforte Publishing House and the art of Ladino printing, Translated into Italian by Silvia Guastalla (Livorno : S. Belforte, 2005); "Mythologizing 1654," Jewish Quarterly Review vol. 94, no. 4 (Fall 2004), pp. 583-94; "Varieties of Haskalah: Sabato Morais' Program of Sephardic Rabbinic Humanism in Victorian America," in Reconfiguring Jewish Culture from Al-Andalus to the Haskalah, eds. Adam Sutcliffe and Ross Brann (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 121-45; and "Livornese Traces in American Jewish History: Sabato Morais and Elijah Benamozegh," Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi nel Centenario della morte di Elia Benamozegh (Milan: De Pas Editrice, 2002), pp. 41-62.
Arthur serves on numerous academic and communal advisory boards, including the Editorial Board of Judaica Librarianship; the Advisory Board of the Footprints provenance project, based at Columbia University, the Advisory Board of the Jewish Play Project, based at the Rochester Institute of Technology; the Executive Committee of the Jewish Counter Culture Oral History Project, based at Penn; International Academic Advisory Board for Sephardic Studies/Livorno, Italy; the Academic Board of Advisors, American Jewish Historical Society; Academic Advisory Board, Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania.