My work as a scholar and writer explores the relationships among art, visual culture, religion, media, Jewish history, and psychoanalysis. Across these subjects, I am interested in how images and stories shape the ways people understand themselves, their histories, and the worlds they inhabit.
My scholarship is often published under the name Maya Balakirsky Katz.
Cambridge University Press, 2023
A study of psychoanalysis, religion, and the intellectual and publishing culture surrounding the emergence of the psychoanalytic periodical.
Brill, 2020
A study of the reciprocal relationship between Jews and modern mass media, including print, film, photography, advertising, and postcards, and of the larger theoretical questions raised by the intersection of Jewish history and media history.
2016
A history of the Jewish artists, filmmakers, writers, and cultural networks that helped shape Soviet animation, examining questions of Jewish identity, visual culture, politics, and representation.
Edited by Maya Balakirsky Katz
Brill, 2013
An edited collection exploring how images, media, and public memory shaped the Dreyfus Affair and its changing meanings in France, Zionist culture, and America.
A study of the visual world of Chabad, including portraits of the rebbes, photography, popular imagery, material culture, and the ways images participate in religious identity and devotional life.
American Imago 82, no. 1 (2025): 27–53.
An exploration of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood through attachment theory and mentalization, examining psychological development and the ways relationships become part of our internal worlds.
American Imago 78, no. 2 (2021): 389–418.
A reconsideration of Freud’s enigmatic text on Diana of the Ephesians and its place within his writing on religion.
Contemporary Jewry 31, no. 1 (2011): 3–24.
An examination of religion in the formative years of psychoanalysis through Wilhelm Stekel’s case histories of a rabbi and a priest, and the ways Jewish identity, religion, and the conventions of the psychoanalytic case history shaped their presentation.
AJS Review 34, no. 1 (2010): 1–31.
A study of Wilhelm Stekel’s treatment of a rabbi in consultation with Freud—one of the earliest encounters between psychoanalytic treatment, the rabbinate, and Jewish religious life.
Find this article on Academia.edu →Alongside my academic publications, I occasionally write for a broader audience about Freud, psychoanalysis, religion, images, and the history of psychoanalytic thought.
Viewpoints in Psychoanalysis, Fall 2022.
Read “Ten Footnotes on Reading Freud” →Fifteen Eighty Four — Cambridge University Press
A visual and textual reconsideration of Freud’s relationship to religion, beginning with The Moses of Michelangelo and asking what Freud’s own images might reveal about belief, mysticism, and his understanding of the source of psychic life.
Read “FREUD: The GODFULL JEW” →Fifteen Eighty Four — Cambridge University Press
A reflection on the relationship between Freud’s thinking about religion and the publishing culture in which psychoanalysis emerged, drawn from the research behind Freud, Jung, and Jonah.
Read “Freud’s Publish-and-Perish Religion” →
My scholarship has also brought me into conversations beyond the university through interviews, lectures, film and media appearances, and public discussions about art, Jewish visual culture, Soviet animation, religion, and psychoanalysis.
For speaking and lecture inquiries, please contact me directly.
A more extensive selection of my publications and academic work is available on my Academia.edu profile.
View my Academia.edu profile →