
Josh Lambert
Sophia Moses Robinson Professor of Jewish Studies and English
Links
Research, writing, and teaching at the intersection of Jewish Studies and American literary and cultural studies.
As a researcher, I seek out areas in which Jews and Jewishness played important and understudied roles in the development of U.S. culture, with the aim of helping specialists in Jewish Studies and American Studies, as well as a broader reading audience, understand 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century cultural history in more complex and rigorous ways.
My books Unclean Lips (NYU, 2014) and The Literary Mafia (Yale, 2022) each take up a different area in which Jewishness profoundly shaped the direction of modern and contemporary life in the U.S.: in the former, around questions of obscenity and sexual representation, and in the latter, in the development of the book publishing industry. I’m currently researching a new book, an expansive narrative history of Jews and Jewishness in U.S. literature and culture that rejects the patriarchal and heteronormative biases that have characterized such histories in the past, and that centers instead the perspectives of women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color. (Imagine, instead of Abraham Cahan, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen, a broad survey of U.S. Jewish culture anchored by Gertrude Stein, Muriel Rukeyser, Jo Sinclair, Sammy Davis, Jr., Fran Ross, Adrienne Rich, Paula Vogel, and Sass Orol.)
As a teacher, I aim to demonstrate the relevance of American Jews’ experiences, texts, and ideas to a wide range of academic and cultural concerns. In other words, I try to make the case that anyone who cares about the history of literature, popular culture, and the arts needs to spend at least a little time thinking seriously about Jews and Jewishness.
I teach a wide range of conventional and unconventional materials, including fiction, poetry, nonfiction, drama, comics and graphic novels, film, television, radio and podcasts, journalism, legal decisions, video games, and archival materials. I aim to have my syllabi reflect Jewish and non-Jewish diversity and emphasize female and nonbinary voices. At the end of my courses, my expectation is that students will take with them increased confidence as interpreters of American and Jewish literature, culture, and history, and a set of texts and cultural objects that will continue to speak to them and challenge them.
I have served on the board of directors of the Association for Jewish Studies and on the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Historical Society, and serve on the editorial boards of several academic journals. I judge fiction prizes regularly, and I write book reviews and essays for general audiences in publications like the New York Times Book Review, Jewish Currents, and Lilith.
I never get tired of thinking or talking about baking, video games, and Paris.
Education
- B.A., Harvard University
- Ph.D., University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Current and upcoming courses
Introduction to Jewish Studies
JWST102
This course exposes students to major approaches to the interdisciplinary field of Jewish Studies. We will focus our attention, in sequence, on different objects of analysis: Jews, Jewish languages, Jewish texts, Jewish politics, and Jewish cultural expression. In each case, we will ask what it means to call that kind of object (a person, word, political idea, work of culture, etc.) Jewish, and we will examine some of the most influential answers that have been presented, from antiquity to modernity. By the end of the semester, students will have a solid grounding in the field as a whole and a roadmap for pursuing the study of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture at Wellesley (and beyond).
(JWST 102 and REL 102 are cross-listed courses.)-
What stories do U.S. video games tell us, and whose stories are they to tell? In this course, we will survey the history of narrative video games in the U.S., from the 1980s to the present, paying particular attention to how games represent gender, ethnicity, religion, and class. We will explore the way that games allow for identification across difference; the significant contributions of American Jewish game developers; and the prevalence of exoticism, cultural appropriation, and misogyny in the history of the medium. Games we will consider, in whole or in part, include Silas Warner’s Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and its many sequels, Jordan Mechner’s Karateka (1984) and The Prince of Persia (1989), Freedom! (1993), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin’s The Walking Dead (2013), David Cage's Detroit: Become Human (2018); Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross’ The Last of Us, Part 2 (2020), Zak Garriss’ Life Is Strange: True Colors (2021), and Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides (2022). We will consider game studies scholarship and criticism by Akil Fletcher, Jacob Geller, Cameron Kunzelman, Julian Lucas, Soraya Murray, Gene Park, Amanda Phillips, and Anita Sarkeesian, among others, and students will be expected to write several analytical or research essays. Fulfills the English Department’s Diversity of Literatures in English requirement. (ENG 275 and JWST 275 are cross-listed courses.)