Scholarship Opportunity
African American Studies and Jewish Studies
Deadline: November 10, 2025
This scholarship provides financial support to a student pursuing coursework in both African American studies and Jewish Studies. Learning about African Americans and Jews will encourage students to delve into the history of two minority groups whose distinct experiences illuminate questions of race and ethnicity. By taking courses in these fields, students will gain a deeper understanding of both groups and their encounters with American society as a whole.
The successful applicant will receive:
- $13,000 for completion of 3 courses in African American Studies and 3 courses in Jewish Studies or
- $15,000 for completion of 3 courses in one department plus a certificate or major in the other department
Eligibility:
To apply for the scholarship, students must have taken (or be currently taking) at least one course in Jewish Studies or African American Studies.
Questions? Contact scholarships@cjs.wisc.edu.
Dr. Nina Caputo is the Lipton Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. Her publications include Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia: Community, History, and Messianism, and Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, a Graphic History. In addition, she co-edited Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity and On the Word of a Jew: Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust. Her work has appeared in Jewish Social Studies, Jewish History, Perichoresis, and the Journal of Law and Religion, as well as various anthologies. Caputo teaches courses on “Medieval Jewish History,” “Early Modern Jewish History,” and “Jewish in Christian Spain.” She has trained graduate students in medieval Jewish history, medieval history, and early modern Sephardic culture.
Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara is a historian of colonial North America and the early American Republic and professor and current chair of the Department of African American Studies. Her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined—small towns and cities in the North and Midwest. Her first book Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the business of slavery—economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: From Slavery to Suffrage in the Wisconsin Territory, 1725—1868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-Black race relations in the Midwest.
Clark-Pujara is committed to both academic scholarship and public history. She works closely with the Nehemiah Center for Urban Development, where she teaches community history courses. Her public history work also includes writing blogs and op-eds like, “Many Tulsa Massacres: How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence,” for the Smithsonian American History Magazine and “The 1539 Project: Why Black Midwest and Iowa History Matters“. Des Moines Register.
Read more about the Center for Jewish Studies and Department of African American Studies joint field trip to New York City in April 2025 as a part of our ongoing partnership and mission to teach the history of African American and Jewish culture in the United States.
