Jay Geller is Professor of Modern Jewish Culture, emeritus, at Vanderbilt University, where he taught from 1994 to 2021. He has also taught at, among other institutions, the University of Vienna and the Pontifical Gregorian University (Rome). In 2001 he was the Fulbright/Sigmund Freud Society Visiting Scholar in Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna) and in 2011 Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations (Woolf Institute, Cambridge, U.K.).
His fellowships include grants from DAAD, ACLS, NEH, and ATS. He is the author of On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (2007, Fordham), which covers much of his corpus; The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (2011, Fordham), which devotes chapters to Levin Varnhagen, Feuerbach, Marx, Nordau, Schreber, and Benjamin as well as to the German reception of Spinoza’s Tractatus and the intersections of the representations of Jews and Chinese and of Jews and syphilis; and Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (2018, Fordham), which addresses works by, e.g., Heine, Kafka, Freud, Salten, Siodmak over and against the long history of the deployment of images of nonhuman animals, real and imagined, to dehumanize Jews (and others).
His current project is “S(h)ibboleth: Circumcision and Jewish Survival during the Shoah,” which draws upon hundreds of audiovisual testimonies, memoirs, survivor literature and films.