Joshua Teplitsky

Joshua Teplitsky

Joseph Meyerhoff Chair in Modern Jewish HistoryAssociate ProfessorRuth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program

Joshua Teplitsky joins the Department of History at Penn after eight years of teaching at Stony Brook (SUNY). He joins the Department of History as associate professor and the new Joseph Meyerhoff Chair in Modern Jewish History. He earned his PhD in 2012 from the departments of History and Hebrew & Judaic Studies at New York University which he followed with a two-year postdoc at the University of Oxford. Professor Teplitsky’s research explores various aspects of Jewish life in early modern Europe, with particular interests in Jewish-Christian relations, the History of the Book, and the history of epidemic disease. His first book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library (Yale University Press, 2019) and was named the winner of the Salo Baron Prize of the AAJR for best first book in Jewish Studies in 2019, the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is currently at work on a book reconstructing a plague epidemic in eighteenth-century Prague as a window into rhythms of Jewish social and cultural life as they were thrown into crisis.