Photo by Lisa Abitbol

Where many professors would see a challenge—a compressed seven-week term, taught both in person and online, in the midst of a pandemic—Josh Lambert saw an opportunity.

Lambert, the new Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English, had long wanted to teach a course about comics—from the Sunday morning “funnies” of yesteryear to contemporary graphic novels—paying particular attention to representations of minorities. “The ‘funny pages’ feels like an absolute misnomer for them,” he says of those early comic strips. “The actual jokes don’t land, ever, and they’re not funny at all. In fact, they are racist and misogynist.”

但教导文本和图形的相互作用构成了一些后勤问题。如何让每个人在同一页面上，从字面上谈论漫画框架时？巧合的是，技术教师在大流行期间依靠教导，提供了一个解决方案。Using Sakai, the College’s learning management system, and Perusall, a “social e-reader” platform, Lambert was able to make available all the visual content for the course in a way that could be easily bookmarked, annotated, queried, and responded to by everyone in the class. “In a normal semester I would feel weird having my students do all of their reading in an online system, but because of the pandemic, I thought we could use these digital materials … to do an intense close reading.”

对于一个任务来说，他让学生梳理了两个流行的19世纪晚期幽默杂志，冰球和Judge,和comment on the representations of minorities.

“我们现在拥有的20个帖子和许多职位，这只是一个真正表明这一点的恶劣象征博物馆，”他说。

虽然校园新的校园，Lambert对教学中的实验并不陌生。近十年来，他是阿默斯特，群众的Yiddish书籍中心的教育总监。，他在yiddish语言和文学中开发了长度从三到七周的文献中的课程。他还忙于研究，在犹太人，性行为和性言论自由中出版一本书。他目前正在完成关于犹太人在美国出版业的影响的一本书。“任何关心20世纪美国文学的人，无论您是特别关心犹太人作家[或不] ......您需要注意犹太人在出版系统中的作用，因为它们在创造文学和可能性的格式方面是如此有影响力对于文学文化可能在美国，“他说。

That wide-ranging perspective informs how he envisions leading the Jewish Studies program. (Lambert replaces Fran Malino the program’s inaugural chair, who retired in 2018.) “The main role that I see for Jewish Studies is to make the study of Jews and Jewishness relevant, as widely as possible, across the curriculum and to as many students as possible,” he explains. “Whatever you end up studying, it’s important to think in an informed way about the role of Jews in that culture throughout history.”