Andrew Atwell

Visiting Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Jewish Studies

Primary Academic Program: Jewish Studies

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Middle Eastern Studies

Biography: Andrew K. Atwell is an anthropologist, Judaism and Middle East specialist, and Visiting Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Jewish Studies at Bard College. He is the author of “Resuscitating Torah: ‘Judaization,’ Moral Imagination, and National-Religious hesed in Central Israel” in Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, forthcoming 2026; “Religion, Authority, Grammar: The Scholarly Legacy of Secular Concepts” in Buddhist Violence and Religious Authority: A Tribute to the Work of Michael Jerryson, 2022. He is broadly interested in moral imagination in its relation to political theology, political economy, and traditions of critical reflectivity, and his primary focus is on national-religious Israeli Judaism. His current book project, Lod Alight: National-Religious Activism, Moral Imagination, and the Limits of Reflection, is a study of the moral imagination at work in a national-religious “social settlement” movement that has settled in Israel’s binational cities since the mid-1990s. Fellowships include: Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant; Fuerstenberg Fellowship in Jewish Studies; Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies Research Grant, University of Chicago. At Bard since 2024.



BS, Eckerd College; MA, University of Virginia; MA (Religious Studies), MA (Anthropology), PhD, University of Chicago.
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