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Professor Sheila E. Jelen specializes in modern Jewish literature and culture, focusing on the intersections of gender, Jewish literacy, and the interplay of ethnographic, photographic, and literary discourses in popular reconstructions of pre-Holocaust East European Jewish life. Her recent monograph, "Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies" (2020), delves into how literary sources and visual images inform American Jews' understanding of their pre-Holocaust heritage. Following this, "Israeli Salvage Poetics" (2023) examines how Hebrew writers have dealt with their East European legacy over the past fifty years. Jelen is also working on "Testimonial Montage: Family Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance" (forthcoming 2024), which scrutinizes the delicate balance between collective and individual testimonies from a literary perspective. Before joining the University of Chicago, she was the Zantker Professor of Jewish Literature, Culture, and History and the Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001 and taught at the University of Maryland, College Park from 2001 to 2018. Additionally, Jelen serves on the board of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies.
Department of Philosophy