Executive Director

Curtis Hutt, PhD

Executive Director, Leonard and Shirley Goldstein Center for Human Rights

Curtis Hutt teaches Judaic Studies at UNO.  He received his Ph.D. in Religion and Critical Thought from Brown University where he wrote his dissertation on the ethics of historical belief.  The bulk of Curtis' work is related to the representation of sacred pasts in Jewish and Christian traditions with a focus on the history of Jerusalem.  

Curtis has two additional graduate degrees, one in Philosophy and another in the history of religion with a focus on Judaisms during the Second Commonwealth Period and the earliest Christianities.  He has published on a variety of topics related to latter, articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls, religious specialists in ancient Judaisms, and the origins of Christian anti-Semitism.  Curtis has also published on contemporary Jewish philosophy, pilgrimage, comparative religious ethics, as well as religion and human rights.  In 2013, Curtis published his first book with SUNY Press on religion and the representation of the past.  Over the past three years, Curtis has published three additional books – Jewish Religious and Philosophical Ethics (2018), The Sorrows of Mattidia: A New Translation and Commentary (2019), and Artistic Representations of Suffering: Rights Resistance (2021). Presently, Curtis is spearheading academic research on the ethics of religious renewal movements through organizing international conferences on this topic across the globe. In 2018, the first of these was held in Japan at Shizuoka University.  Conferences in Jerusalem and Bahrain are in the works.

In addition to teaching courses in Judaic Studies (Hebrew Bible / Jewish Thought and Practice) and the Religion and Critical Thought class at UNO, Curtis has also taught upper level classes on Jerusalem, Christians and Israel, Apocalypticism, and Holy Land Pilgrimages.   Curtis serves on the faculty advisory boards of Islamic Studies, Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Medical Humanities, and teaches in the online Masters Program in Creative and Critical Thought (MACCT).  Most summers, Curtis can be found in Jerusalem where he spends time working with local and international scholars as well as writing and presenting his own research.