Alanna Cooper

Alanna E. Cooper is the Abba Hillel Silver Chair of Jewish Studies at Case Western Reserve University, where she also serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Cooper is a cultural anthropologist whose work explores the relationship between religious communities and the material worlds they build, inhabit, and leave behind. This inquiry has taken her from the Bukharan Jewish communities of former Soviet Central Asia to the contracting and dissolving congregations of America’s small rust belt cities.

Cooper’s current book project, Disposing of the Sacred: Jewish Congregations in 21st Century America (to be published with Pennsylvania State University Press in 2027) is woven from ethnographic encounters with synagogue congregations that are downsizing, merging, and dissolving.  The work follows congregations’ decision-making around dispossession of their sacred objects including stained glass windows, Torah scrolls, memorial plaques, and the synagogue buildings themselves.  The ways in which these items are cast off, and the stories told about them as they move into others’ custody, reveals the anxieties, imaginaries, and hopes released by these acts of disentanglement.

During the Spring of 2027, Cooper will visit UVA as the inaugural UVA Jewish Studies Distinguished Visiting Scholar-in-Residence. While at UVA, Cooper looks forward to advancing her research on the intersection of material culture, sacred space, and Jewish art by engaging with UVA Jewish Studies' interdisciplinary faculty and students through reading groups, seminars, and lectures. Cooper also plans to deliver a lecture as part of Jessica Andruss's spring course "Global Judaism" about Jewish life in Central Asia, drawing on her 2013 book Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism (Indiana University Press).