Brief biography

Aviva Ben-Ur is Full Professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she holds adjunct status in the Department of History and in the Programs in Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature. A historian specializing in Atlantic Jewish history, slavery studies, and the Ottoman diaspora, she is the author of Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries and Synagogues of Suriname: Essays (Hebrew Union College Press, 2012) and Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Epitaphs (Hebrew Union College Press, 2009), both co-authored with Rachel Frankel; and Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York University Press, 2009). With Wim Klooster, she co-edited Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2023). Her current book project, “Carpet Craze: Oriental Rugs, the Native Advantage, and Britain’s First Turks,” focuses on the migratory experiences of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the United Kingdom, erstwhile capital of the world’s Middle Eastern carpet trade, during the first half of the twentieth century.