Rate My Professor Mari Rethelyi

Maria Rethelyi is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University, where she also serves as Director of the Jewish Studies Program and Section Head of Religious Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago (2009) and an M.A. in Religion from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago (2000). Prior to her appointment at LSU, Rethelyi taught at Loyola University New Orleans and Queen's University. Her research interests encompass modern Hungarian Jewish history and literature, Jewish mysticism, Jewish race theories, gender studies, the history of nationalism, and Orientalism. She has taught courses on Jewish cultural history, gender and religion, and the history and theory of religions. Rethelyi's scholarship has contributed to the understanding of Jewish identity in the modern era, particularly through examinations of race, gender, and identity in modern Jewish thought and culture.

Rethelyi has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her notable publications include “Antisemitism in Hungarian Literature from 1800 to 1918,” forthcoming in The Cambridge History of Antisemitism, Volume 2 (2025); “‘Isolated brotherless branch of his race’: Jewish Images of Kinship with Hungarians at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” forthcoming in East European Jewish Studies (2024); “The Khazar Ancestry of Hungarian Jews,” Nineteenth Century Studies 34 (2022): 95-115; “The Jewish Mockery of Suicide: Counter-Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Hungarian Jewish Literature,” Journal of Jewish Identities 15/2 (2022): 181-200; “Hungarian Jewish Stories of Origin: Samuel Kohn, the Khazar Connection and the Conquest of the Land,” Hungarian Cultural Studies 14 (2021): 52-64; “The Birth Metaphor in Anna Lesznai’s Difference Feminism,” Women in Judaism 18/1 (2021); “The Context and Subtext of Goldziher's Memorial Lecture on Vambery,” Hungarian Studies 34/2 (2021): 259-81; “The Wanderer's Gaze: The City in Modern Hungarian Jewish Literature,” Studies in Jewish Culture and History 21/2 (2020): 131-55; “Hungarian Nationalism and the Origins of Neolog Judaism,” Nova Religio 18/2 (2014): 67-82; "Rabbinic Understandings of Marital Rape in the Talmud," in Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 195-212; and “A Place of Pretense and Escapism: The Coffeehouse in Early 20th Century Budapest Jewish Literature,” Religions 9/10 (2018).