Brief Biography of 

Dr. Jeffrey Blutinger...

Assistant Director, Dr. Jeffrey C. Blutinger, will join the History Department and the inter-disciplinary Jewish Studies Program in the Fall 2004.  He will develop curriculum and will be thoroughly involved in the Jewish Studies Program.

Dr. Blutinger received a Ph.D. in Modern Jewish History from University of California, Los Angeles in 2003.  His secondary fields include Modern European Intellectual and Modern German history, as well as Modern Hebrew Literature.  He received several awards, including a Fulbright fellowship for study in Israel.  He is also a graduate of UCLA's School of Law, and he practiced law for seven years, a profession he left to become an historian.

Professor Blutinger's chief research interest is nineteenth century Jewish intellectual history, in particular the ways that modern conceptions of an international Jewish community were formed, transmitted, and received. His dissertation dealt with the how and why the nineteenth century German-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz became a catalyst for prompting Jews to read history.  In German-Jewish libraries, Graetz's work had the same canonical status as Goethe, Schiller, and Mendelssohn.