Sarah Pearce

S.J. Pearce is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where her teaching and research focus on the intellectual history and literature of Jews, Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain. During the academic year 2018-19 she is also an Institute Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her recently-published first book, The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will, examines the ways in which Jewish intellectuals in thirteenth century Spain and France understood Arabic to be a language of cultural prestige. She earned her PhD at Cornell University (Near Eastern Studies, 2011). During the 2012-13 academic year, she held the Louis and Hortense Apfelbaum Fellowship at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; and for the fall semester of 2014 she was awarded a Paulette Goddard Junior Faculty Fellowship at NYU. She is also the recipient of the Michael Camille Memorial Essay Prize (2014) and the John K. Walsh article prize awarded by the MLA Forum on Medieval Iberia and La Corónica (2015).