Karen Skinazi

Karen E. H. Skinazi is the most Jewish person in the entire world (or so many people, including the president of an Orthodox shul, repeatedly tell her). Her interests, however, actually extend beyond the Jewish world to a multiethnic sphere, and much of her scholarly curiosity revolves, more specifically, around stories of marginalized women who defy the odds in their quests for success. Marion, the Story of an Artist's Model, for instance, offers a fascinating look at the life of an ambitious young woman struggling to make it in a white man's career at the turn of the twentieth century and is based on Sarah Eaton Bosse, sister of writers Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), and a Chinese-English Canadian in the United States who "passed" as white during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Women of Valor, Karen's new monograph, explores the literature, film, and music of and about Orthodox Jewish women who, over the last quarter century, have been subject to a series of increasingly fundamentalist religious laws, leading to alarming accounts in the media and popular culture, and a feminist demand for the women’s liberation from a patriarchal regime that includes modesty patrols, driving bans on women, and gendered bus segregation. Sound intriguing? Women of Valor might surprise you: Orthodox Jewish women are doing a lot more than lamenting their fate at the back of the bus waiting for white Western feminists to save them . . .

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy - PhD New York University (2000 — 2005)

Companies

• Senior Lecturer and Director, Liberal Arts University of Bristol (2018)
• Faculty development University of Birmingham (2015 — 2018)
• Lecturer, English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies University of Birmingham (2015 — 2017)
• Lecturer Princeton University (2011 — 2014)
• Instructor, Department of English and Film Studies University of Alberta (2006 — 2011)
• Visiting Assistant Professor, English Department Fordham University (2004 — 2006)