Magda Teter

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Magda Teter, an associate professor of history at Wesleyan University, is a scholar of early modern religious and cultural history, Jewish-Christian relations in particular. Her book Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge University Press, 2006) challenges the perception that the Catholic Church triumphed in Poland and demonstrates the superficiality of the re-Catholicization of the ruling elites.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Teter will work on a book that will further our understanding of the social dynamics of religious violence and coexistence between Jews and Christians in early modern Poland. The book moves beyond nationalist narratives that view Jewish and Polish histories separately—presenting the early modern society in Poland as a web of people and cultures in which Jewish and Christian threads are tightly interwoven—and also focuses on crime to unpack its meaning in the context of religion, politics, law, and gender relations.

Teter received her undergraduate degree from the University of Warsaw, Poland, in Oriental languages and a PhD from Columbia University in history. She has been a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University, and her work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Koret Foundation, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Yad HaNadiv and the Beracha Foundation, among others. She directs the Early Modern Project, a resource for early modern history and Jewish studies, which was supported by the Library of Congress, the Mellon Foundation, the University of Maryland, and Yeshiva University.