OUR TEAM
Canada’s Synagogues draws its energy from a wide circle of collaborators. Undergraduate researchers contribute fresh eyes and sustained fieldwork to the project’s growing archive, while community partners across the country lend the local knowledge, memory, and access that make each entry possible. The core team below carries the project’s research, direction, and daily coordination forward.
Principal Investigators
Adam S. Cohen
Adam S. Cohen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, where his scholarship illuminates the sacred visual worlds of the medieval and Jewish traditions. His publications, including Signs and Wonders: 100 Haggadah Masterpieces and Art and Architecture of the Middle Ages, trace how sacred objects and spaces carry theology, memory, and communal identity across centuries. For Canada’s Synagogues, Adam contributes this expertise to the study of Jewish sacred architecture across the country, connecting individual buildings to the broader traditions his research addresses.
Jessica Mace
Jessica Mace is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto, specializing in the art and architecture of Canada. Her research centres on modernity, the circulation of knowledge across the 19th and 20th centuries, and critical heritage studies, illuminating long overlooked histories within the built environment. As Editor in Chief of the Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada since 2015, she brings sustained expertise to the documentation of heritage buildings and their place within the broader visual culture of the country. For Canada’s Synagogues, Jessica applies this grounding in Canadian architectural history and heritage studies to the study of synagogue buildings across the country, situating them within the wider narratives of place and identity her scholarship addresses.
Research Coordinator
Amalya Feldman
Amalya Feldman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, where her research focuses on Jewish architecture, urban thresholds, and cultural networks in late medieval and early modern Spain. Her dissertation traced how Jewish and converso communities in late medieval and early modern Mallorca navigated shifting political, social, and religious pressures through the small, interconnected spaces of homes, marketplaces, and ports, revealing the role of urban porosity in shaping memory and identity. As Research Coordinator for Canada’s Synagogues, Amalya extends this scholarly grounding in Jewish spatial history to the coordination of the project’s research, connecting her work on Jewish architecture to the ongoing documentation of synagogue buildings across Canada.