Biography
Cecelia (Celie) Fischer is a doctoral student studying the intersection of historical methods and religious texts in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research examines the porous boundary among Jewish theology, biblical scholarship, and historicism as navigated by modern Jewish scholars. In particular, she is interested in the central questions of secularism, particularism, universalism, and pluralism as Jewish theologians wrestle with them in their various post-Enlightenment intellectual contexts.
Prior to attending Columbia, Celie studied History and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (Arabic and Hebrew) at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she worked with the UCLA Dialogue Across Difference Initiative and UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. Her undergraduate history thesis investigated the influence of historical-critical scholarship in Weimar Germany on Abraham Joshua Heschel's understanding of a shared Jewish-Christian eschatological history.