Scholarship and Biography
He has published three books about the Jews in early modern England; three books about Christianity and radical Christian thought, same time and place; and one book about Turkey in the British imagination, 1776-1923. He is now writing a book about William James as an historian of religion.
Katz took his D.Phil. at Oxford, where he was a pupil of Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre of Glanton). He then taught for 41 years in the Department of History of Tel Aviv University from 1978, twice serving as chair, and was promoted to Full Professor in 1990. He held the Abraham Horodisch Chair for the History of Books from 1994 until 2019, when he came to Brandeis. Katz was Director of the Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization at Tel Aviv University (2006-2018) and a member of the Israeli National Archives Commission (appointment by the Prime Minister) from 2009 to 2016.
He has been elected Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study; the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania); the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (Koç University, Istanbul); the Department of History, Princeton University; and the Oxford Centre for European History. In 1997, he was elected a permanent fellow of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Zentrum zur Erforschung der Frühen Neuzeit, Renaissance Institut, Frankfurt, Germany. Katz was Visiting Professor in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul (2010-11), and four times a lecturer at the International Summer University for Intercultural Leadership, Projet Aladin.
Katz received numerous teaching awards at Tel Aviv University, including the Dean’s Teaching Award (2013), and was selected as among the 14 lecturers (out of more than 1,000) identified from teaching evaluations as ‘mega-excellent’.
Since joining the Brandeis History Department in 2019, Katz has served on the Senate Council, the Senate, the Humanities Council, the Committee on Academic Standards and Policy, the Israel Initiatives Advisory Committee, the Phi Beta Kappa Selection Committee, and other advisory bodies. He was a member of the Task Force on Academic Administrative Structure and the Task Force on Free Expression.
Most importantly, he has been Director of the History of Ideas Program since 2020, reviving a part of the Brandeis heritage that was so important in the first decades of its founding.
Katz was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, England, in 1993.