Allison Schachter

Professor of Jewish Studies; Winkelried Family Chair of 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 minority cultures. 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.”

 

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. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U. C. Berkeley in 2006. She has received grants in support of her work from the Graduate Division at the University of California, Berkeley, the National Foundation of Jewish culture, Vanderbilt University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Yiddish Book Center, and the Simon Dubnow Institute.