I study issues of Gender and Law in the documents of the Cairo Geniza and contemporary responsa. I am particularly interested in the masculinities of Jews in the medieval Islam world and in women's letters.
My specific contribution for the project will be to write a study on the connection between masculinity and travel. This topic is remarkably absent from current scholarship on medieval masculinities, and yet it is very dominant both in Geniza letters as well as in Hebrew literature written in Spain (specifically the maqamat collections of al-Harizi and the anonymous Misheli he-Arav). I will argue that both literary works as well as everyday correspondence associate masculinity with travel yet are ambivalent toward this association. Particularly interesting is the perspective of women that can be recovered from their letters in which they see men’s travel as a constant threat.