Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He holds a BA in History from Stanford University as well as an MA and a PhD in Modern European History from the University of California, Berkeley. In his research and teaching, Penslar takes a comparative and transnational approach to modern Jewish history and the history of Zionism. He is the author of Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870-1918 (Indiana, 1991), Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (California, 2001), Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (Routledge, 2006), Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton, 2013), Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale, 2020), and Zionism: An Emotional State (Rutgers,  2023). He also co-edited Orientalism and the Jews (Brandeis, 2004) and Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Theory and the Historiography of Zionism (Brandeis, 2023). Penslar has taught at Indiana University Bloomington, University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford, and has held visiting professorships at Columbia University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). Penslar is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research and an honorary fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.