Ethan Calof
Ethan Calof (they/them) is entering their fifth year in Vanderbilt’s English PhD program, and their fourth year in the Comparative Media Analysis and Practice (CMAP) program. Their research broadly focuses on questions of diaspora, queer history, and assimilation/de-assimilation into normative whiteness. In particular, they analyze how young, secular, potentially culturally disconnected, diasporic North Americans use the specific cultural, media, and technological forms of the long 21st century to situate their identities within a queer cultural genealogy and configure their relationships to North American white, heteropatriarchal hegemonies. Their 2019 Master’s thesis from the University of Victoria is titled "New Men for a New World: Reconstituted Masculinities in Jewish-Russian Literature (1903-1925)." Their 2020 Master’s thesis from Vanderbilt University is titled "‘On account of you I have no translator!’ Michael Chabon and Cynthia Ozick’s Literary Conceptions of Intergenerational Yiddishlands." They were a 2021-22 Mellon Graduate Student Fellow in Digital Humanities.
Specialization(s)
- Diasporic North American Media (Literature and filmed media)
- Queer Theory and Media
- Long 21st Century North American Literature
- Arab- and Jewish-North American Literature
- Cyberculture, Fanfiction, and other Fan-Generated Texts
- Comparative Literature
- Digital Humanities
Representative publications
Quoted in: “The enduring allure of a good love triangle,” Nylah Burton, Vox, July 31, 2023 (https://www.vox.com/culture/23808725/summer-turned-pretty-love-triangles-romance)
“What is a Legible Jewish Experience? Or: how to use digital tools to understand which regions and experiences are treated as more “authentic,”” Ethan Calof, ArcGIS Storymap, June 6, 2022 (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/f9dd33b14cb642bcb2b536722e0970e7)
“Forty Years in the Desert: A Jewish Journey,” Ethan Calof, Adobe Spark including original film, June 2021 (https://express.adobe.com/page/g6FTPtlMcLc7D/)
““It’s the Appropriation for Me”: TikTok Audio and the Disembodied Black Voice,” Tori Hoover and Ethan Calof, web page, December 2020 (https://hooverv.wixsite.com/cmap)
"What I Left Behind in the Move," AJS Perspectives: The Unfinished Issue, Fall 2020.(https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/publications-research/ajs-perspectives/the-unfinished-issue/the-profession-what-i-left-behind-in-the-move)
"Unpacking my Jewish Identity through the Ravensbrück Memorial Site," Narratives of Memory, Migration, and Xenophobia in the European Union and Canada, 2019. (http://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/11314/CH8_Narratives_2019.pdf?sequence=12&isAllowed=y)
"Pain and Perspective," Anthology of Social Justice, Decolonization, and Intersectional Feminisms, 2018.
Awards
Mellon Graduate Student Fellowship in Digital Humanities 2021 – 2022
Awarded by Vanderbilt University
Ian H. Stewart Graduate Student Fellow 2017 – 2018
Awarded by the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society (University of Victoria)
Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s 2017
Awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada)
President’s Research Scholarship 2017
Awarded by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies (University of Victoria)