Join us for a roundtable discussion of the new book Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations by Hannah Kosstrin. Respondents will reflect on the book’s contributions to the fields with which it intersects, including Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, diaspora and exile, dance studies, and South Asia studies. Following remarks by the author and invited panelists moderated by Naomi Brenner, the event will conclude with discussion and audience Q&A.
Light refreshments will be served.
Speaker Bios:
Alexander Kaye is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, where he occupies the Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Chair in Israel Studies and directs the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He received a PhD in Jewish history from Columbia University, and a BA and MPhil in history from the University of Cambridge. Dr. Kaye researches Jewish intellectual history and the history of political and legal thought. He has written and edited numerous books and articles, including The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel (OUP, 2020).
Harmony Bench is a scholar of dance and performance studies whose research cuts across technology, media, and society. She is Professor of Dance History and Theory at Ohio State and author of Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (Minnesota, 2020), and co-editor of the multidisciplinary collection Archival Entanglements with Puja Batra-Wells (Ohio State, 2026). With collaborator Kate Elswit, Harmony brings the digital humanities and dance history into greater dialogue through projects including Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (Ref: AH/R012989/1; winner of the 2021 ATHE/ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship) and Radical Accounting: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Data as a Framework for Historical Imagination (commissioned for the 2024–25 Edges of Ailey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art). Current work engages both critically and practically with motion data, embodied archives, and machine learning for performing arts history.
Ila Nagar is Professor of South Asian Studies at The Ohio State University. She is a sociolinguist whose research examines the relationships among language, power, and meaning, with particular attention to nationalism and social hierarchy in contemporary India. She is the author of Being Janana: Language and Sexuality in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2019) and Weaponizing Language: Legislating a Hindu India (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her current research explores how political and social meanings are produced, contested, and transformed through language, particularly in the context of contemporary India.
Hannah Kosstrin is a dance historian and movement analyst invested in Jewish migration histories. She is Director of the Melton Center for Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Dance and at The Ohio State University. She is author of Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow (Oxford University Press, 2017), the newly released Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations (Oxford University Press, 2026), and numerous articles. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Jewish Identities, Dance Research Journal, and Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, and on the board of directors of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Dance and the Melton Center for Jewish Studies. Supported by the Thomas and Diann Mann Symposium Fund.
