Bio
Dr. Shai Zamir is a historian of the early modern Iberian world, specializing in the history of the family and immigration, Jewish and Sephardi history, and religious polemics. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his PhD in History at the University of Michigan, where he received the 2025 Michael S. Bernstein Dissertation Award from the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. Before returning to Israel, Zamir was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Sephardi Studies at Northwestern University and a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago as part of its Society of Fellows.
He is currently working on two projects: a book manuscript on the social and cultural history of friendship in the early modern Iberian world, and a series of essay-length studies on Jews and New Christians in less-studied regions of the Spanish Empire. His work has been supported by the American Historical Association, the Center for Jewish History, the John Carter Brown Library, the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation, Casa de Velázquez, and other institutions. He recently received the Golda Meir Award for New Faculty at the Hebrew University.
Publications
- “New-Christian Friendships and Spaces of Sociability in the Early Modern Spanish City,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 24.3 (2023): 321-337.
- “Debating Friendship in Seventeenth-Century Lima, 1678-1681”, Colonial Latin American Review 32.3 (2023): 414-438.