Janice Fernheimer

author/professor/mom/bourbon lover

Janice W. Fernheimer is Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies; Zantker Charitable Foundation Professor and Director of Jewish Studies; and James B. Beam Institute for Kentucky Spirits Faculty Fellow at the University of Kentucky. She is also co-director of the University of Kentucky-Jewish Heritage Fund Kentucky Holocaust Education Initiative. In addition to teaching courses at the intersection of rhetoric, writing, technology, and Jewish studies, she freelances for bourbon industry publications and teaches “Bourbon Writing” and “Bourbon Oral History” in the Certificate for Distillation, Wine, and Brewing program. She is the author of Stepping Into Zion: Hatzaad Harishon, Black Jews, and the Remaking of Jewish Identity (University of Alabama Press 2014) and co-editor along with Michael Bernard-Donals of Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice (Brandeis University Press 2014). She received the 2020 MidWest Archives Conference Presidents’ Award for her work on the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project, and in spring 2021 she launched the Women in Bourbon Oral History Project in partnership with Bourbon Oral History students and the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. The Women in Bourbon Oral History Project received the 2024 Sarah Bennett Holmes Team Award. In collaboration with author/illustrator JT Waldman, she is currently authoring an archives and oral-history based transmedia project America's Chosen Spirit, which includes a webcomic, podcast, and sip’n’study lecture series that detail the influences of Jews, Blacks, women, LGBTQIA individuals, and “other others” on the Kentucky bourbon industry. She is a Stave and Thief Certified Executive Bourbon Steward and was recently recognized as a 2024 Woman of Whiskey with the Bourbon Women Mike Keyes Ally of the Year Award.