with Mellon fellowships
Two members of the faculty will pursue formal scholarly training outside their own disciplines as recipients of New Directions Fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The New Directions Fellowship program, now in its second year, allows for mid-career faculty in the humanities and kindred social sciences to further their research and receive extra-disciplinary training during one academic year and two summers. Through the support of formal substantive and methodological training in areas of faculty interest, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aims to fulfill the great potential of humanistic scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries.
Christine Hayes, professor of religious studies, and Maria Georgopoulou, associate professor in the history of art, have been awarded the competitive fellowships, which are given to "faculty members in the humanities or humanistic social sciences who have not yet received tenure or who have recently done so who wish to acquire systematic training outside their own disciplines."
Yale was invited to nominate two candidates for the fellowships. Hayes and Georgopoulou were both chosen by the Mellon Foundation on the recommendation of a panel of distinguished scholars.
Hayes will study for one year at the Yale Law School and complete a book exploring the problem of human legal authority in a system of divinely sponsored law, focusing on rabbinic examples. She will also develop a course on the history and theory of religious law. Georgopoulou will study Arabic and economic history at Yale and the University of Chicago to advance her research project on "Art, Industry and Trade in the Medieval Mediterranean," which will culminate in a book-length study.
Hayes is an internationally known scholar of early rabbinic literature and culture whose research and teaching cover the range of classical Judaic texts from the Bible to Talmud and related medieval literature. Her current work focuses on classical rabbinical sources, and she is attempting to reconstruct the history of Jewish culture and religion in the Second Temple and rabbinic periods (550 B.C. to 600 A.D.). She has authored two books, "Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds: Accounting for Halakhic Difference in Selected Sugyot from Tractate Avodah Zarah" (winner of the Saslo Baron Prize for a first book in Jewish Thought and Literature by the American Academy for Jewish Research) and "Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud." Hayes has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1996 and previously taught at Princeton University. She won University Morse Research Fellowship for 1998-99, given to junior faculty members to free them from classroom responsibilities to focus on research.
Georgopoulou's work focuses on the cross-cultural artistic and economic interaction between Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam. Her New Directions Fellowship will allow her to explore the economic and cultural interactions of the medieval Mediterranean in the 13th century through an examination of objects that were traded between the Italian merchants of Venice and Genoa, the Byzantines, and the Ayyubid and Mamluk rulers of Muslim states in the Near East. She is the author of "Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism" and of numerous articles and reviews. A member of the Yale faculty since 1992, she serves as director of undergraduate studies for the Humanities Major and is co-chair of the Hellenic Studies Program at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. The recipient of the Poorvu Family Teaching Prize in 1999, Georgopoulou has received numerous research awards, including several Griswold Travel Grants for study in the Mediterranean and an award from the Hilles Publication Fund, among others.
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