Adam Shear

Adam Shear is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the Jewish Studies Program, the Department of History, the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, and the European Studies Center. His research and teaching interests focus on Jewish cultural and intellectual history in medieval and early modern Europe; the history of the book and the impact of print on Jewish culture in the early modern period; and Jewish-Christian-Muslim cultural and intellectual interactions. He regularly teaches courses on the history of religious diversity and on Jewish-Christian-Muslim conflicts and coexistence.

He has published on Jewish thought in the early modern period and the Enlightenment, early modern Jewish book culture, and Jewish-Christian relations. His first book, The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity 1167-1900 (Cambridge University Press) was the winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship and the Morris D. Forkosch Award for the best first book in intellectual history (awarded by the Journal of the History of Ideas).

Shear has held visiting fellowships at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania) and at Magdalen College (University of Oxford). He was the founding convenor of the Scholar’s Working Group on the History of the Jewish Book at the Center for Jewish History in New York and has served as a member of the Center’s Academic Advisory Council. He is a former co-editor of the AJS [Association for Jewish Studies] Review and has served on editorial boards of the University of Pittsburgh Press, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, and the Journal of Early Modern History.

Along with colleagues from Columbia University, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the University of Pennsylvania, Shear is co-director of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place - a long-term digital humanities project focusing on the circulation and movement of early printed Hebrew and Jewish books. This database project connects book history in the early modern period with the formation of modern library collections.  

Projects and interests:

• Commerce in books, the print shop, and the book trade in early modern Europe as a “trading zone” (borrowing Peter Galison’s terminology) in the multi-confessional European republic of letters.
• Censorship, expurgation, and approbations in early modern European print culture and their analogy to contemporary forms of content moderation and regulation.
• Scholarly collaboration in the digital humanities; micropublications and credit; models of trusted crowdsourcing. 
• Historical modes of managing religious diversity and pluralism; informal and formal frameworks of co-existence and co-operation of ethnic and religious groups.    

Representative Publications and Presentations:

• “Censorship as Allegation:  Overzealous Content Moderation?” presented at Renaissance Society of America, Dublin, March 2022.
• “Audiences of the Printed Book Since the Invention of Print,” Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Cultures, introductory volume, general ed. Emile Schrijver, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2021.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2772-4026_EJBO_SIM_031561
• “The Dissemination and Afterlives of Expurgated Hebrew Books: A Preliminary Report,” Workshop on The Destruction and Preservation of Hebrew Books. New Sources and Methodologies for the Study of Catholic Censorship and Other Forms of Dismemberment and Rescue of the Hebrew Texts in Italy Over the Centuries, Oxford/Bologna/on-line (November 15, 2021).
• “Books as Markers of Identity?  Text and Paratext in the Shaping of (Imagined) Community,” Imagining the Renaissance/Defining the Jews, conference, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, January 2020.
• “Old Texts and New Media: Jewish Books on the Move and a Case for Collaboration,” co-authored with Michelle Chesner, Marjorie Lehman, and Joshua Teplitsky, in Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships A Critical Examination of Labor, Networks, and Community, ed. Robin Kear and Kate Joranson (Elsevier, 2018), pp. 61-73. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-08-102023-4.00005-7
• "Intercultural Contacts Projected in the Paratexts:  Hebrew Books and Christian Readers," Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 25 (2013): 87-112.