Excerpt from University homepage story by Rebekah Schroeder, Office of Communications
Princeton professors Eve Krakowski and Marina Rustow have received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for projects connected with Princeton’s Geniza Lab, which studies a cache of more than 400,000 ancient paper and parchment documents recovered from a synagogue in Cairo.
The grants were part of a round of awards made to 81 humanities projects nationwide to support “organizations and scholars working to illuminate and educate about the great ideas and events of the past,” NEH Acting Chairman William English said in the agency’s announcement. Both of the Princeton scholars’ grants were awarded as part of the NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations program.
Documents from the Cairo Geniza date back as far the 9th century and were discovered by scholars in the 1880s. Part of their appeal is that they were written by ordinary people, largely in Egypt but also in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and beyond.
Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and a professor of Near Eastern studies and history. She has overseen the Geniza Lab since joining Princeton’s faculty in 2015. Krakowski is an associate professor of Near Eastern studies and the Program in Judaic Studies and is the Geniza Lab co-director.
