Dina Danon’s research focuses on the eastern Sephardi diaspora during modern times and draws heavily on previously unexplored Ladino language archival material. Danon is particularly interested in social history and how its tools help revise prevailing scholarship not only on the Sephardi world but on Jewish modernity as a whole. Capturing the voices of both destitute beggars and lay oligarchs, peddlers and guildsmen, housewives and rabbis, her first book, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History (Stanford University Press, 2020) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture. She began work on her second book, which explores the marketplace of matchmaking, marriage, and divorce in the modern Ottoman Sephardi world, as a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also currently at work on a co-edited volume entitled Longing and Belonging: Jews in the Modern Islamic World. Danon is also engaged in the preservation of the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) language. Along with Bryan Kirschen (Romance Languages), she co-directs Binghamton’s “Ladino Lab,” an initiative that offers undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty specialized training in reading Ladino texts and paleography. The project also offers a language apprenticeship program in which students are paired with native speakers across the world. The project is supported by a Public Humanities Grant of Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.
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