Last fall, Nathaniel Deutsch was appointed as the director of the Institute for Humanities Research at U.C. Santa Cruz.
Deutsch is an American religious scholar. He is a specialist in Judaism, Gnosticism, and early Christianity and is on the faculty of University of California, Santa Cruz. He attended the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. as well as his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees.
Deutsch has taught religion at Swarthmore, and is currently a Professor of Literature and History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also is co-director of the University's Center for Jewish Studies. Deutsch was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 to support his research on the Jewish ethnographer S. Ansky for his forthcoming book, The People’s Torah: Ansky and the Invention of Jewish Ethnography.
List of selected publications:
- Inventing America's 'Worst' Family; Eugenics, Islam and the Fall and Rise of The Tribe of Ishmael (2009)
- The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (2003)
- Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism (2000, co-editor with Yvonne Chireau)
- The Gnostic Imagination: Gnosticism, Mandaeism, and Merkabah Mysticism (1995)
- Guardians of the Gate: Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiquity (1999)
