Biography

Evan Goldstein studies how American Jewish identities are shaped by global histories of religion, race, and sexuality. Specializing in Jewish literary and intellectual history, his research joins traditions of modern Jewish writing with contemporary conversations about the politics of identity. His current book project, Secrets of Inheritance: Modernism and the Afterlives of Jewish Literature, explores how the racial and sexual politics of the Jewish body have shaped transnational Jewish engagement with modernist aesthetics, from late nineteenth-century Paris to contemporary America. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Religion & American Culture, Prooftexts, Parapraxis, and Studies in American Jewish Literature. Before coming to Knoxville, he studied Theology at Boston College and Union Theological Seminary, and earned a PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University in 2024.

Publications

“Freud’s Jewish Closet,” Parapraxis Magazine (forthcoming).

“Lectures to Specters: Ozick’s Genealogies,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History,
vol. 40, no. 3 (2024), 140-174.

“Moloch and Monotheism: Ozick’s Aestheticism,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, vol.
43, issue 1 (March 2024), 29-42.

“‘A Higher and Purer Shape’: Kaufmann Kohler’s Jewish Orientalism and the
Construction of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, vol. 29, no. 3 (Fall 2019), 326-360.

Review of Michael Altman, Heathen, Hindu, Hindoo: American Representations of India, 1721-
1893 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Society for US Intellectual History Blog, November 4, 2018.