Jessica Roda

Jessica Roda is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. She is currently serving as an assistant professor of Jewish Civilization in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research interests include performing arts, religion, gender, international politics, and transnationalism. She earned Ph.Ds from both Sorbonne University and the University of Montreal respectively, during which she studied the political implications of Sephardic and Arab-Jewish music as well as the Unesco Convention of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003). More recently, Dr. Roda began an ethnography of Ultra-Religious Jewish life in Montreal and New York City, including both the normative and the underground scenes. She is working on her second book ''Performing Jewishness. Hasidic Women on Stage and on Screen in North America'', where she investigates how the artistic and political performances of Hasidic women act as an agent of social and cultural empowerment within the religious world and as a space challenging gender, racial, and religious identities in the context of decolonizing feminism.

Before joining the Center for Jewish Civilization, Dr. Roda was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University (Department of Jewish Studies), Concordia University (Department of History and Anthropology/Sociology), and University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada Research Chair in Urban Heritage). Her research has been funded by several programs and institutions including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture du Québec, the Berman Foundation Early Career Fellowships, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, the Fondation du Judaïsme Français, the French Society for Ethnomusicology and the Sara Marcos de Benveniste Fellowship. In 2014, she was selected by the Royal Society of Canada and the Science Council of Japan to participate in the WISET Program (Women in Science, Engineering, and Technology, http://src-rsc.com/en/events/wiset-exchange-programme). Additionally, Dr. Roda has been a visiting scholar at UCLA (Department of Ethnomusicology), Columbia University (Heyman Center) and Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil. Beyond her academic life, she is also trained as a pianist, flutist, and modern-jazz dancer (City of Paris Conservatory), and grew up in French Guiana.