Allison Schachter
Associate Professor
Program in Jewish Studies
Allison Schachter specializes in modern Jewish literature and culture, with allied interests in modernism, transnationalism, and diaspora studies. Her research focuses on Jewish writers’ responses to the historical transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the rise of nationalism, the forces of secularization, and the upheaval of traditional gender roles. Trained as a comparativist, her research encompasses Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and French literature. She is the author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012). At present she is working on a manuscript entitled Gender, Secularism, and Jewish Modernity. At Vanderbilt, she teaches an array of courses in modern Jewish literature, modernism, and literary theory.
She received her B.A. with honors in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1996. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2007 to pursue research on Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While in Jerusalem she began studying Yiddish, continuing her Yiddish studies at YIVO, the Yiddish Institute in Vilnius, and the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U. C. Berkeley in 2006.
Representative publications
- Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- "Orientalism, Secularism, and the Crisis of Hebrew Modernism: Reading Leah Goldberg’s Avedot" forthcoming in Comparative Literature. 2013.
- "Modernist Indexicality: The Language of Gender, Race, and Domesticity in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism," MLQ 72.4 (2011).
- "A Lily Among Bullfrogs: Dahlia Ravikovitch and the Field of Hebrew Poetry." Prooftexts. 28:3 (2009).
- "Dovid Bergelson and the Landscape of Yiddish Modernism." East European Jewish Affairs. 38.1 (2008).
- "Jewish Women as Industrious Earners." Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility. December 2008. Reprinted online in JBOOKS.
- "The Shtetl and the City: The Origins of Modern Jewish Nostalgia in Shloyme reb khayims and Ba-yamim ha-hem." Jewish Social Studies. 12.3 (2006).
REVIEWS
- Book Review of Anita Norich's Discovering Exile and Jonathan Freedman's Klezmer America for American Literature 81.3 (September 2009).
- "Language: A Yidisher Kop." Haaretz (English Edition), April 2, 2007 Review of Hana Wirth- Nesher's Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature.