Biography
Aviva Ben-Ur is a historian in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst specializing in Atlantic Jewish history, slavery studies, and the Ottoman diaspora. Her latest book is Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Her current project, funded in part by the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship, focuses on the ordeal of citizenship in Western Europe as experienced by thousands of Ottoman Jews, Christians, and Muslims during the first half of the twentieth century.