EAJS Secretary and Trustee/Director
Professor François Guesnet teaches Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He held research and teaching positions at Leipzig, Potsdam and Oxford universities, at Dartmouth College, at the Hebrew University Jerusalem and the University of Pennsylvania, and short-term teaching positions at Vilnius University and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
He holds a PhD in Modern History from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau, and specializes in the early modern and 19th century history of Polish Jewry. He is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry. In his research, he looks at Jewish social history in Eastern Europe, the history of Jewish communal institutions and their political culture. He has worked on the history of Jewish-non-Jewish relations, antisemitism, and continues to investigate the history of the matting of hair.
His book publications include Polnische Juden im 19. Jahrhundert: Lebensbedingungen, Rechtsnormen und Organisation im Wandel (1998), Der Fremde als Nachbar. Polnische Positionen zur jüdischen Präsenz in Polen. Texte seit 1800 (2009), and, with Gwenyth Jones, Antisemitism in an Era of Transition: The Case of Post-Communist Eastern Central Europe (2014). Together with Glenn Dynner, he published Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis. Studies in Honor of the 70th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky (2015), Negotiating Religion. Cross-disciplinary perspectives, co-edited with Cécile Laborde and Lois Lee (2017), and, with Jerzy Tomaszewski, Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present (2022) and served as co-editor of several volumes of Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry.
François Guesnet believes in the potential of the European Association for Jewish Studies to foster academic cooperation across Europe, especially after the challenge of the Covid19-pandemic and the continued war waged against Ukraine. He wishes to contribute to strengthening academic working relationships across Europe, one of the building blocks of European civil society. He held the role of EAJS Secretary for July 2014 to July 2018. Since 1 January 2023, he functions as interim Secretary, and was nominated by the EAJS Executive Committee for Secretary 2023-27.