Eliza Slavet is a dreamer, thinker, maker, writer, rabble-rouser, bridge-builder, spiritual caregiver, scholar of religion, and mom of two awesome kids. She's also a board certified chaplain through the Association of Professional Chaplains (APC), ordained and endorsed through the Order of Universal Interfaith (OuNI), PhD from UC San Diego, and author of Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question (Fordham University Press: 2009). 

And now in the first person: I'm currently working as a chaplain for VITAS Healthcare (hospice).  And I'm loving it. I love listening and being present to the "everything else" in the room-- the stuff that the medical, social worker, psychologists, and specialists can't quite get to. That stuff. 

For awhile there, I was officially unofficially re-preparing a Haggadah for the Wicked Child for publication and working on a book on Philosemitism. But honestly, I'm always preparing something, usually writing in words. I've put together a new haggadah each year, led taschlich services, performed a wedding, and tried to do good with this brief time on earth.

On the academic front, my scholarship uncomfortably reached between psychoanalysis, Jewish Studies, and Moses narratives. I received a PhD in Literature from the University of California, San Diego; an MM in Oboe Performance from Yale School of Music; and a BA in English from Yale University. 

In the past, I played the oboe, wrote poetry, and made sound art installations as well as a few videos. In 2001, she proposed a sound installation, Breathing Traces, to the Berlin Jewish Museum: a large room, with speaker-cones hanging from the ceiling, each speaker playing a recording of the sounds of one Jewish resident of Berlin. A curiosity cabinet of souls, breathing their way through life... The proposal was ultimately rejected, but it led her to read Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida, which pushed her to begin writing what became her dissertation, "Freud's Moses: Memory Material and Immaterial" (2007), which became the book, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question (Fordham University Press, 2009).

Back in the academic realm, I organized a number of panels, but the most infamous one was in May 2006 at the New York Public Library: Freud's Foreskin: A Sesquicentennial Celebration of the Most Suggestive Circumcision in History.

Teaching positions have been in departments of literature, interdisciplinary study, religion and history; institutions include Parsons School of Design, New School University; Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University (NYU); Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY); and the University of California, San Diego. My courses focused on memory and forgetting, literary theory, Moses and multiplicity, hearing voices, race and religion, inventing tradition, psychoanalysis, and the history of anti-semitism.