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Personal History

I moved to Australia in April, 2008 from Colorado where I was an Associate Professor of Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. I was born in New York and grew up in Niger, West Africa and Massachusettes. I attended graduate school in literary studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary completing my PhD in 1999. In the US I received two major research fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel, and an Academy of Learned Sciences Research Fellowship.

Current Research

I am currently working on a book about the influence of Wagner's opera Tannhäuser on three prominent Jewish thinkers, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz.

Major Publications

Books
The Cross and Other Jewish Stories by Lamed Shapiro. Editor Yale University Press, 2007.
Journeys beyond the Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Select Essays
"The Kvetcher in the Rye: J. D. Salinger and Questions of the American Jewish Canon," in Beyond the Modern Jewish Canon: Arguing Jewish Literature and Culture, A Festschrift in Honor of Ruth R Wisse. Forthcoming Harvard University Press, 2008.
"Lamed Shapiro's Life and Work," in The Cross and Other Jewish Stories. Ed. Leah Garrett. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2007.
"Cynthia Ozick's Envy: A Reconsideration", Studies in American Jewish Literature. Summer 2005.
Landscape in the Jewish Imagination. In Studying Cultural Landscapes. Eds. Iain Robertson and Penny Richards. London: Edward Arnold Publishers. Published February 2003.
"Sabotaging the Text: Tannhäuser in the Works of Heine, Wagner, Herzl and Peretz", Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 9.1. Fall 2002. pp. 34-52.
"The Jewish Robinson Crusoe, Comparative Literature 54.3. Summer 2002. pp. 215-228.
Yiddish Immigrant Novels and the Perils of Assimilation, Melus 26.3. Fall 2001. pp. 203-29.
Trains and Train Travel in Modern Yiddish Literature, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 7.2. Published June 2001. pp. 67-88.
The Wandering Jew Comes Home, Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History. Published Fall 2000.
The Self as Marrano in Jacob Glatstein's Autobiographical Novels, Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 18.3. Published Fall 1998. pp. 207-223.
The Jewish Don Quixote, Cervantes, 17.2. Published Fall 1997. pp. 94-105.

Areas of Research & Supervision

Jewish Culture, American Immigrant History, Zionism and Jewish Literature.

Teaching

JWC3/4260 - Jewish literature of destruction