Freie Universität Berlin

Post-Doc, Institut für Deutsche u. Niederländische Philologie

About

I am a cultural historian and sociologist specialising on Jewish heritage revival in Central Europe and the representations of Jews in the Polish and German literature and popular culture.

I am currently an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Department of German and Dutch Philology of the Free University in Berlin, where I work on a project "Jewishness in Translation". The project addresses the question of what dynamics govern the adaptation of Jewish past into the Polish and German-language culture and what are the borders of “translatability” between different national patterns of memory. Dealing with the medium of literature as a space of conceptualizing the other and unveiling “the unconscious of culture” (Lachmann, 1996: 289), the project applies theories of cultural translation to a comparative analysis of representations of Jewishness in the post-1989 Polish and German literary prose.

At the same time, I am also finishing my first book on the klezmer revival in Poland and Germany.

I have recently co-edited (with Sophie Wagenhofer) Cultural Representations of Jewishness at the Turn of the 21st Century (European University Press, 2010).

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