Professor Kaplan will share some of her work on Anthony Mordecai Russell (including showing brief clips of him performing) and discuss the Black-Jewish anthology that she is co-editing with Sara Feldman (Harvard University).
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Brett Ashley Kaplan is the director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies and Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature where she serves as the Director of Graduate Studies. Professor Kaplan has analyzed the intersections of Blackness and Jewishness in the U.S. in her scholarhsip, and she developed an undergraduate course at Illinois based on that work: "Jewish American and U.S. Minority Literatures in Dialogue." She is the author of Jewish Anxiety in the Novels of Philip Roth (Bloomsbury, 2015) which analyzes race and power in contemporary Jewish American literature through rigorous discussions of Roth’s fiction. Her scholarship includes Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (UP Illinois, 2007) and Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory (Routledge, 2011) and publications in venues such as Memory Studies, American Literary History, Journal of Jewish Identities, Modern Philology, Textual Practice, Criticism, Comparative Literature, Studies in Jewish American Literature as well as Salon.com, The Jewish Review of Books, The Conversation, Ha’aretz, and AJS Perspectives. Kaplan also co-edited a cluster on 21C. Jewish Writing and the World in American Literary History, published an interview with Nicole Krauss in Ninth Letter, and has been interviewed on the AJS Podcast, NPR, and The 21st.
