Corbin Allardice
Corbin Allardice (they/them) received a BA with honors (2018) from the University of Chicago in Jewish Studies. They wrote their undergraduate thesis on the macaronic poetics of Yankev Glatshteyn, particularly with regard to the interplay between Glathsteyn’s “Yiddish Chauvinism” and the porous borders of literary Yiddish. Their research has tended to focus on modern(ist) Yiddish poetry, multilingual writing, and translation studies. Corbin was a 2021-2022 Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, working on the verse of Vilna partisan Rikle Glezer. They have also been extensively involved with the Yiddish Theater scene in New York, and are a founding member of GLYK: a queer Yiddish theater collective.
Maya Bimka
Maya Bimka is currently (2024) beginning her PhD at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, aiming to perform a comparative analysis of Talmudic stories and post-modern narratives to uncover how these literary structures reflect and challenge societal power dynamics. She received her BA in Hebrew Literature and Jewish Thought from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where she also earned her MA in Hebrew Literature, focusing on the intersections of class and gender within Hebrew literature, drawing on both ancient Jewish texts and contemporary works, mostly by the author Orly Castel-Bloom.
Rinnah Ye-One Chung
Rinnah Ye-One Chung grew up in Jerusalem, Israel, and moved to the U.S. during her high school years. Upon receiving her bachelor’s degree from Boston College in English, she then pursued her musical ambitions and completed a master’s degree in music (Violin Performance) at Rice University. Since then, her passion has been building a bridge between literature and music—connecting the expressed sounds and words under the same theme—so that she could better communicate with her audience/readers.
Before joining the PhD program in Modern Languages and Literature Department at Johns Hopkins in 2024, Rinnah completed two semesters of master’s studies in Comparative Literature at Seoul National University. Her research interests lean toward post-Holocaust literature—the voice of the silenced and the suffered in Modern Hebrew literature.
Käthe Erichsen
Käthe Erichsen is a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University with a primary focus in Yiddish Literature and a secondary focus in Film and Media Studies at the Center for Advanced Media Studies. She earned her BA and MA in German Studies at Wayne State University. In her research, she examines questions of 20th-century exile, heritage, identity, and multiculturalism, examining poetry composed in Yiddish, German and Russian. In addition to her literary research, her media research extends beyond literary and philosophical inquiries of exile and into the materiality of Holocaust documentation, exploring the site of the archive through her work as a production assistant for the documentary film The Archives, produced by Ein Susses Geheimnis, LLC.
Lila Fabro
Lila Fabro is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her research centers on the intersections between Yiddish and Spanish in Argentine literature. She is particularly interested in the bilingual Yiddish-Spanish publications in Argentina, and in the emergence of postvernacular Yiddish in the works of Argentine contemporary authors. She earned her BA in Art History with an emphasis on Musicology from the University of Buenos Aires. Prior to Hopkins, she worked at the Research Area on Performing Arts and Jewishness at the Institute of Performing Arts “Dr. Raúl H. Castagnino” based in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires.
Adi Nachum
Adi Nachum holds a dual BA in Sociology & Anthropology and Comparative Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and MA in Comparative Language & Literature from Tel Aviv University, where she also majored in creative writing. Her MA thesis examines contemporary Hebrew literature by women authors and formulates the term “poetic passing,” a hermeneutic strategy that mirrors physical passing in textual form. In her doctoral studies, Adi focuses on the nexus of gender, race, and legacies of colonialism across the Mediterranean. Her doctoral project aims to explore Jewish manifestations of poetic passing in comparative frameworks, alongside other languages and cultural contexts, especially French and Italian literatures.
Joseph Reisberg
Joseph Reisberg grew up in and around Baltimore and attended Goucher College, studying history and creative writing. He has led workshops on Jewish poems from Tanakh to the twenty-first century as well as Yiddish literary history and gossip. Reisberg was the 2022-2023 Applebaum Family Fellow in Bibliography and Translation at the Yiddish Book Center, where he was also on the exhibition staff of Yiddish: A Global Culture. His poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Jewish Fiction.net, The Adroit Journal, The Loch Raven Review, and more. He is thrilled to be joining the MLL community as a PhD student in Jewish Languages and Literatures, where he hopes to study Yiddish radical presses and book clubs in the United States. He is currently translating the short stories of Mina Smoler, who writes characters at the margins of society, many non-Jewish, and reveals the hypocrisies of a postwar American society of supposed plenty.
Cameron Scott
Cameron Scott is a PhD student specializing in Modern Hebrew within the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He received his bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University in Ancient Near Eastern Studies with an emphasis in Biblical Hebrew and a minor in Modern Hebrew. He completed his master’s degree in Israel Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev where his research focused on Modern Hebrew and Israeli culture. His thesis, titled “Tanakh Ram: A Translation of Necessity or Ideology?”, sought to analyze the hidden secular agenda behind the controversial Modern Hebrew translation of the Hebrew Bible named Tanakh Ram. Cameron’s doctoral research will investigate the work and influence of Paul Philip Levertoff on Modern Hebrew literature/language and Zionist discourse. Levertoff, born and raised a Hasidic Jew, converted to Christianity in his early adulthood and became a fervent missionary and preacher, especially in regard to converting fellow Jews. His aim in this research is to show that the creation and establishment of Zionist/Israeli Modern Hebrew culture did not develop out of a Jewish echo chamber; and that a Christian cultural undercurrent, which had its antecedents in individuals like Paul Philip Levertoff, is still alive and well in Israeli society. Shedding light on the work of Levertoff and other similar individuals will help in accurately contextualizing Israeli culture as the multidimensional phenomenon that it is.
Sophia Shoulson
Sophia Shoulson received her BA at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she was a double major in German Studies and the College of Letters. At Wesleyan, Sophia wrote her undergraduate thesis on Yiddish folklore studies and Jewish nationalism in the early 20th century. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa with high honors in 2018, Sophia spent two years as the Richard S. Herman Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, working primarily in bibliography as well as writing and translating for the Center’s publications and website. Sophia began her PhD in Jewish Languages and Literatures in the fall of 2020. Her current interest is the rise of modern Yiddish literature within the context of print technology and Jewish canonization practices.
Betzalel Strauss
Betzalel Strauss received his BA in Linguistics and Literature from Tel Aviv University, where he also earned his MA in Yiddish literature. His master thesis, “Emigration, Ecology and Myth: Rikudah Potash’s Yiddish Poetry,” focuses on Yiddish poetry written in Palestine in the first half of the 20th century. As part of his research, he compared Potash to contemporary Hebrew poets, read her poems from an ecological perspective, and analyzed the stylistic properties of her modernist writing. Throughout his research he also translated many of her poems as well as other Yiddish texts. He is currently (2023) starting his PhD at Johns Hopkins intending to delve into The Yiddish literature of Palestine, comparing it to Hebrew literature to better understand the relationship between these two languages and cultures.