Joshua Shanes is an historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish history in East Central Europe and its emigrant communities. His research focuses on the process of Jews negotiating new identities under the impact of modernization. His first book, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg
Galicia (Cambridge University Press, 2012), shows that Zionism was not about escaping Diaspora existence but rather normalizing it. Professor Shanes is currently completing a history of Jewish Orthodoxy and, with Professor Naomi Seidman, a reader of Orthodox texts. He completed his B.A. (1993) at the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. (2002) at the University of Wisconsin. Before joining UC Davis in 2025, he served as Professor of Jewish Studies, and Director of the Arnold Center for Israel Studies, at the College of Charleston.

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