Judith L. Goldstein - Vassar Anthropology

Judith L. Goldstein joined the Vassar faculty in 1976. She has done ethnographic and archival research in Iran, Israel, Paris, and Rome. She has published on ethnic, religious and sexual identity; on folk theater and popular culture; on consumer culture in nineteenth-century Paris and the contemporary United States; and on aesthetics and modernity . Her publications include Realism Without a Human Face in Spectacles of Realism (Cohen, Margaret and Christopher Prendergast, eds., University of Minnesota Press, 1995), and The Female Aesthetic Community in The Traffic in Culture (Marcus, George and Fred Myers, eds., The University of California Press, 1995).

Professor Goldstein's current project, Souvenirs of Rome, is based on fieldwork begun in 1996 with Jewish ambulant vendors of souvenirs in Rome. This study explores both the role of peddling in a modern economy and the value of souvenirs.

Professor Goldstein has been a Woodrow Wilson fellow, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and of the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, and her work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, NSF, NEH, NIMH, and the Mellon Foundation. She is Professor of Anthropology and also teaches courses in Jewish Studies. In 1998 she taught "The Museum, the Ruin and the Archive" with Professor Brian Luckacher (Art History) in conjunction with the Delmas Grant for European Studies.