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Department of English

Allison Schachter

Winkelried Family Chair in Jewish Studies
Professor of English; Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, College of Arts and Science

Allison Schachter is Professor of English, Jewish Studies, and Russian and East European Studies. She is an award-winning scholar of modern Jewish literature and culture. Her research interests include diaspora, transnational and world literary cultures, gender studies, and modernism. Her first book, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2012) traced the shared diasporic histories of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Her second book Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (Northwestern 2022), was awarded the 2024 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies and was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. The book revises the history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism by foregrounding women’s voices. She is currently working on a new project on mid-century women intellectuals, which examines how African American and Jewish women writers theorized the postwar moment from feminist and leftist perspectives. She is an avid translator of Yiddish literature. Together with Jordan Finkin she translated From the Jewish Provinces: The Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok (Northwestern 2021), which was awarded the 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies and was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association translation prize. In 2024 she was awarded an NEH Translation and Scholarly Edition grant for her current translation project, “The Storyteller from Minsk: The Selected Works of Rokhl Brokhes.”


Representative publications

Books:


Articles:

  • Jewish Literature/World Literature: Between the Local and the Transnational"  Co-authored with Lital Levy, PMLA 130.1 (2015).
  • "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).
  • “Women Reading Modernity: Gender, Secularism, and Literary Realism in the Writing of Abraham Cahan and Sholem Aleichem” Jewish Quarterly Review, forthcoming 2021.
  • “Jewish Writing and Gender between the National and Transnational,” Disseminating Jewish Literatures, Eds.  Susanna Zepp, Ruth Fine, Natasha Gordinsky, Kader Konuk, Claudia Olk, and Galili Shahar (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020): 229-234.
  •  “Minority Cosmopolitanism in Elisheva Bikhovsky's Simta'ot” Mehkere yerushalayim be-sifrut ivrit, 30 (2019): 103-120.
  •  “A Non-Universal Global: On Jewish Writing and World Literature.” Co-authored with Lital Levy. Prooftexts, 36: 1-2, (2017): 1-26.