Director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Dynamics in the History of Religions
Professor for Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times
Project leader JewsEast & Project leader of the GIF project The Ten Lost Tribes
KHK Visiting Research Fellow 2011

Alexandra Cuffel is professor of Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. She received several fellowships, among them a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2007, the Women’s Studies in Religion Fellowship from Harvard Divinity School in 2006, and a fellowship from the Dorot Foundation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996.

Her research focuses on relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages, specifically on the intersections of religious polemic, medical theories and gender both in Western Europe and the Middle East. Further research interests are shared saints’ cults and festivals in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean and "racial" attitudes in the Middle Ages. She is currently working on a monograph on shared saints and festivals among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the medieval Mediterranean, and, in conjunction with Prof. Dr. Adam Knobler a study of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim imaginings about the ten lost tribes in conjunction with the development of expectations of the Messiah and an anti-Messiah from the early Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

Education

• Ph.D., Medieval History, New York University, New York City, New York, USA, 2002
• M.Phil., Medieval History, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1990
• B.A., Medieval Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, 1988

KHK Fellowship

Duration: May 2011 - April 2012
Project: Jewish Warriors in Distant Lands

On appointment

Jewish, Christian, Muslim relations in the Middle Ages