Biography

James Loeffler is Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia, where he also serves as Ida and Nathan Kolodiz Director of the Jewish Studies Program. Between 2013 and 2015 he was a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow in International Law and Dean’s Visiting Scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center. At UVa he teaches courses in Jewish and European history, Russian and East European history, international legal history, and the history of human rights. He is a co-covenor of the UVa Human Rights Research Network, a faculty partner in the UVa Religion, Race & Democracy Lab, and co-editor of the Association for Jewish Studies Review. In 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

His publications include The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2018) and The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2010). 

His current research interests include the history of American civil rights law, the relationship between antisemitism and racism, the history of Jewish nationalism, and the East European Jewish political and cultural origins of the concept of genocide.