Fellows » Current Fellows » IHUM Fellow: Amos Bitzan, PhD
Amos Bitzan received his A.B. from Princeton University (2003), where he majored in German Literature and minored in Judaic Studies. He completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley (2011), specializing in the histories of Late Modern Europe and the Jews. His research is about how the “People of the Book” discovered the practice of reading for pleasure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His dissertation, “The Problem of Pleasure: Disciplining the German Jewish Reading Revolution, 1770-1870,” argues that the great turn of Jewish intellectuals toward historical writing in the nineteenth century was in part motivated by anxieties about the solitary and pleasure-seeking reading of young men and women.
In addition to reading for pleasure, Amos enjoys cooking and the cinema. A fan of Berkeley’s august Pacific Film Archive, Amos is looking for an alternative on this side of the Bay. He has lived in Berlin, Hamburg, Montreal, New York, Tel Aviv, Toronto, and Vienna but really prefers being “at home.” He currently resides in Palo Alto with his wife Marina, a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at Stanford. Although Amos is excited about Palo Alto’s balmy weather and The Milk Pail, he will miss the strange citizens of the People’s Republic of Berkeley.