Saskia Coenen Snyder (PhD University of Michigan, 2008) is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. She is the author of Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe, published by Harvard University Press in 2013. Her second book, entitled A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds, Jews, and Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Commerce (Oxford University Press, 2022) examines the role of European, South African, and American Jews in the 19th c. diamond industry.

Her work has appeared, among others, in Jewish Social Studies, Jewish History, Shofar, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, and The Marginalia Review of Books. Coenen Snyder is a recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a National Endowment of the Humanities grant, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Research Fellowship, a DAAD research fellowship, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Faculty Research Grant. During the 2017-18 academic year, she was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam. She is currently working on a research project that analyzes the diamond industry during the Nazi occupation.