Dr. Elena Keidošiūtė who successfully defended her doctoral thesis on Catholic missionary activities among Jews and trends in conversions by Jews in Lithuania has been awarded a Prins Foundation post-doctoral fellowship for 10 months at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. She will be a visiting scholar at New York University concurrently.
According to the Vilnius University webpage, Dr. Keidošiūtė said she felt the fellowship would serve not only to deepen by also assess anew as well as contextualize her research. “I will develop further the research begun during doctoral studies on conversions by Lithuanian Jews to Catholicism in the Russian Empire, interwar Lithuania and the Vilnius region, but more importantly I will have an opportunity to make use of the source materials conserved in the archive of the YIVO, the Jewish research institute. I hope to take part in the discussion with the center and university colleagues as well as researchers visiting these institutions,” she said.
Center for Jewish History president and CEO Joel Levy said on the center’s webpage: ““I congratulate this new class of Fellows and invite them to use our more than five miles of collection materials to enrich their studies. The Center for Jewish History is a unique institution, and these Fellowships offer an extraordinary opportunity to help promising individuals—focused on Jewish studies and beyond—learn and grow as scholars.”
According to the same webpage, the center’s fellowship program “offers financial support to humanities scholars, across different stages of their careers. This distinguished community of scholars has used the Center’s resources to produce scholarship that adds to historical knowledge and advances the field of Jewish Studies. Fellows have published their work in leading presses and journals and hold positions at prestigious universities and cultural institutions in the US, Europe, and Israel.”
According to its webpage, the “Center for Jewish History is a cultural institution, independent research facility and destination for the exploration of Jewish history and heritage. It is home to five partner organizations: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.”