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Rustow receives MacArthur Fellowship

Marina Rustow, the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at the University, is among the 24 scientists, artists, scholars and activists who received this year’s MacArthur Fellowship.

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The distinction, sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, comes with $625,000 grants distributed in quarterly installments over a five-year period. The three criteria for selection include creativity, potential for making future advances and potential to facilitate creative work, and the selection process places emphasis on nominees for whom the grant would help to relieve limitations that might prevent them from pursuing their work. The Selection Committee consists of 12 people who serve confidentially and rotate in and out after each review cycle.

There are no limits on age or area of activity, and individuals are anonymously nominated from a pool of external sources invited by the Foundation to nominate candidates. Applications are not permitted, nor are nominations from an unsolicited source. The Foundation receives approximately 2,000 nominations per year.

Representatives from the MacArthur Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.

Rustow said that she is still considering plans for using the grant, but added that she wants to mentor other scholars.

Rustow joined the University faculty this past July and specializes in Jewish studies of the medieval Middle East. Rustow has analyzed Cairo Geniza, a collection of more than 300,000 folio pages of legal documents, letters and literary materials once preserved in an Egyptian synagogue. These documents now reside in about 200 libraries and private collections.

Rustow explained that because of the complexity of their language, the Cairo Geniza texts are often difficult to understand and only a limited number of scholars have received sufficient training. The texts mostly include legal transactions and other day-to-day records preserved in a range of languages, particularly Judeo-Arabic ones.

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Studying those texts, she said, provides a more insightful understanding of the Medieval Islamic state, especially the lifestyle of Jews, a minority in the empire that stretched from Egypt to Palestine.

“I am interested in the internal history of Jewish communities between the 11th and 13th centuries, a period that they documented so well,” she said. “Reading these accounts allow me to get a sense about the lives of Jews living under Islamic rule on every level from breakfast to poetry to marriage choices.”

Though narratives of the oppressed are often lost, Rustow stated that the scale of preservation is remarkable.

“This is one of the rare historical cases where we have more evidence from the second class minorities of the time than we do from the ruling elites,” she said."We have a lot of literature from the ruling elite, but in terms of documentation and snapshot of the cross section of life, the Jewish accounts were much more concrete."

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Rustow holds a Bachelor of Arts from Yale and completed her doctorate in history at Columbia. She also spent four years studying the textual history of the Babylonian Talmud. She began her career in comparative literature and subsequently studied modern theology, during which she became curious about the lifestyle of Jews and the discrimination they faced.

The last year in which University affiliates were awarded MacArthur grants was in 2013, when the grant was awarded to Kyle Abraham, a guest instructor in the University’s dance program, and Tarell McCraney, a Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts in the 2008-2009 academic year.

This year, there were also two recipients from Harvard, one from Cornell University and one from Columbia.