CANCELED. This talk will be rescheduled for the spring semester.

This talk tells the story of someone you have most certainly never heard of. Her history has left no mark on scholarship; the physical traces of the business she ran over the course of over two decades have similarly disappeared. Yet it was through that business—an inn and restaurant with clients hailing from the Middle East, North Africa, Western Europe and beyond—that an Ottoman Jewish woman by the name of Madame Luna came to constitute and sustain a series of intersecting diasporic Mediterranean networks then taking shape in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Julia Phillips Cohen is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her publications include the books Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), co-authored and edited with Sarah Abrevaya Stein, as well as articles in the American Historical Review, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review, Jewish Social Studies, and AJS Perspectives. She is currently at work, together with Devi Mays, on a book exploring a forgotten network of North African and Middle Eastern Jews in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe.

This event is made possible through the Abraham and Rebecca Solomon and Ida Schwartz Distinguished Lecture on Judaic Studies Endowment.