Joshua Shelly is a doctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History for the 2021–2022 academic year. He is a doctoral student in the Carolina-Duke program in German Studies and holds a BA from Wayne State University (2011) and an MLS (2013) and MA in Religious Studies (2015) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on German Jewish literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to the Rosenzweig Center, his research has been supported by the Leo Baeck Institute and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.

Doctoral Project

Joshua Shelly's doctoral project, entitled Writing a Future State: Spatial Imaginaries of German Jewish Literature, 1847-1932, explores German-language Zionist utopias and related literary texts written at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In this project, he explores how different literary works written by authors such as Theodor Herzl, Franz Kafka and Arnold Zweig inspired, motivated, and sometimes expressed skepticism about the modern Zionist project. In particular, his work interrogates the relationship between literary fantasy and political reality by drawing attention to the manner in which these authors used their respective novels to talk about space and place in Ottoman (later British) Palestine. He argues that these works engage in a rewriting of conventional, religious perceptions of “The Land” (Ha-Eretz) by introducing differentiated, more secularized notions of space and place that challenged those that had long held sway over Jewish (religious) imagination. This secularization of space and place, the project concludes, while never fully embraced, was nonetheless an important part of the emergence of the modern Jewish State.