DIRECTOR OF THE ELIE WIESEL CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES;
PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN AND JEWISH STUDIES;
COORDINATOR OF HOLOCAUST, GENOCIDE, AND HUMAN RIGHTS STUDIES PROGRAMS
Prof. Nancy Harrowitz is the Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University. After receiving her PhD from Yale University, she began teaching Holocaust and Italian studies at BU, and later developed a new program in Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights.
Her scholarly work focuses on questions of changing Jewish identities between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as fascism and the Holocaust in Italy. Investigating questions of cultural difference and connections between multiple forms of prejudice and shame legacies, her books include Antisemitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Matilde Serao and Cesare Lombroso and Primo Levi and the Identity of a Survivor, as well as edited volumes on antisemitism and cultural heroes and on Otto Weininger. She has published widely on Italian Jewish authors including Giorgio Bassani. With Prof. Linda Heywood, she co-organized a lecture program entitled Conversations on Race, in which speakers were invited to campus to discuss their work.
She is currently working on the memoirs of Silvia Forti Lombroso, who escaped fascist and Nazi persecution.