Jenny Geddes

Fellow

Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia

Jennifer L. Geddes is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Her areas of research include evil and suffering, the Holocaust, ethics, critical theory, twentieth-century literature, and religion and culture.

Previously, she was the editor of The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, the Institute’s award-winning journal. Additionally, her work includes Evil after Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics (Routledge, 2001), with John K. Roth and Julius Simon, The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction in 2009, and Kafka’s Ethics of Interpretation: Between Tyranny and Despair (Northwestern University Press, 2016). She was also the guest editor of a special issue of Literature and Theology on “Religion and the Tragic” (June 2005). She is currently working on a book titled Useless Knowledge, Smothered Words, and the Outrage of Banality, focused on modes of responding to the Holocaust in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Sarah Kofman, and Charlotte Delbo.

Professor Geddes has been the Emilia Galla Struppa Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has given lectures and presentations at numerous universities and institutes, including the University of Iowa, the University of Connecticut, the University of Virginia, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the University of Copenhagen, Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Case Western Reserve Academy, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Princeton University.

“Leopards and Invisible Calculators: Violent Incorporation, Political Theology and Kafka’s ‘Leopards in the Temple.’” Political Theology, 2018.

“Verbal Images of Evil and (In)Humanity during and after the Holocaust.” Nordisk Judaistik / Scandinavian Jewish Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 2018, pp. 25–38.

“Theodicy, Useless Suffering, and Compassionate Asymmetry: Primo Levi, Emmanuel Levinas, and Anti-Theodicy.” Religions, vol. 9, no. 114, 2018, online.

Kafka’s Ethics of Interpretation: Between Tyranny and Despair. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2016.

“The Temptation of Forgetting and the Labor of Memory in ‘The Metamorphosis.’” Journal of the Kafka Society of America, 2015, pp. 40–45.

“Vulnerability and Violence: Kafka and Levinas on Suffering.” Literature and Theology, vol. 29, no. 4, Dec. 2015, pp. 400–414.

“Evil.” The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, edited by Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 213–232.

The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments. Edited with John K. Roth and Jules Simon, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

“Religious Rhetoric in Responses to Atrocity.” The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity, edited by Thomas Brudholm and Thomas Cushman, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 21–37.

“Towards an Ethics of Reading Survivor Testimonies.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 41, no. 2, Fall 2008, pp. 1–15.

Evil after Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics. Routledge, 2001.