Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Celia Stern is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies with a focus in Religion and Critical Thought. Her scholarship primarily engages religion and politics, Jewish thought, political theory, and literature. Her dissertation project argues that a new take on performativity in ritual theory — one that takes examples of failure seriously, and as a starting point — offers a better picture of ritual (as able to expand, improvise, and go wrong) and a better practice of memory. The project thus makes a theoretical intervention in ritual theory in order to talk about the politics of Holocaust memory and the possibilities that narratives of failure (and narrative failure) may offer us in the face of (for the moment) steadfast conventions and norms. Stern holds a B.A. in Sociology from Washington University in St. Louis.