Stadler, Lelia

Lelia Stadler is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University, where she focuses on modern Jewish and Latin American history. Her dissertation is a social and legal history of Jewish immigration to the transregional space of South America. It examines Jewish immigrants' encounters with the Argentine state and explores how competing legal systems and norms in the region impacted the ways Jews experienced family, marriage, and divorce in a predominantly Catholic country. Lelia's research has been supported by the Center for Jewish History (Sid and Ruth Lapidus Graduate Research Fellow, 2023-2024), the American Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR), the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. At Columbia, her research has been supported by the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS), the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies (IIJS), The Harriman Institute, and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL).

Lelia holds a BA and MA in Latin American history from Tel Aviv University (summa cum laude). Her recent publication, “In Search of Wandering Husbands: Jewish Migration, Desertion, and Divorce between Poland and Argentina, 1919–1939,” appeared in Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Latin America (Brill, 2020). Her new article, "Ethically or Legally Bigamist? Transatlantic Jewish Families and Law in Catholic Argentina," is forthcoming. Her research projects have been presented at more than ten conferences and workshops on both sides of the Atlantic.

At Columbia, Lelia founded and coordinated the Yiddish MMS Translation Workshop. She also served as the coordinator of the Columbia Latin American History Workshop (2021-2022). Her teaching at Columbia has included modern Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Ottoman history.