Jeffrey Grossman
Associate Professor
Degrees
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin, 1992
M.A., German Literature, Tufts University, Medford, Mass.,1986
University of Tübingen, Germany, 1982-1983
B.A., English Literature, Tufts University, 1982
Interests
My research addresses questions of memory and identity, cultural change and translation in a transnational context (in Yiddish, German and English). My present work focuses on memory and the controversial German (Jewish) writer Heinrich Heine in key historical moments —in American and American Jewish immigrant culture, in the Nazi period and postwar Germany, and as well as in the period of the 68ers in Germany. Recent papers and publications (at Te Aviv University, the Center for Jewish History [YIVO Institute] in New York, Dortmund and the Humboldt University, Berlin) explore these and other issues related German Jewish and Yiddish culture in a transnational and translational context. A forthcoming review article links German Jewish Studies to Memory Studies in both its social-communicative and cultural forms. The Heine material is part of a larger book project on Heine, memory and transmission of texts across different national and linguistic cultures (German, Yiddish, English). My work on memory and German Jewish writers more generally is part of a nascent project on the role of memory in contemporary writing by Jews in Germany.
Recent Courses Taught
Graduate:
- Jews, Germans and the Response to Modernity
- Memory and Recollection in the Age of Goethe
- Intellectual History II (i.e. from Hegel to Habermas)
- Post-Wall German Literature
Undergraduate:
- German Jewish Culture and History (co-taught w/Gabriel Finder)
- The Faust Legend in European Literature (cross-listed in Comparative Literature)
- Faust and Frankenstein
- Literary Responses to the Holocaust (cross-listed in Comparative Literature)
- Jewish Culture and History in Eastern Europe (co-taught w/Gabriel Finder)
- Elementary Yiddish Language and Culture
Books
The Discourse on Yiddish in German Literature from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Camden House, 2000)
Translator, Christian Wiese. The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas. Brandeis UP 2007.
Book Manuscripts in Progress
Heinrich Heine’s Contested Afterlives: Between German Literature and Jewish Writing
Select Articles
“The Business of Memory: German Jewish Studies Today: Review Article,” Monatshefte 103.4 (2011) (forthcoming)
“Translation and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Germany and North America,” in Trans-lation – Trans-nation – Trans-formation: Übersetzen und jüdische Kulturen, ed. Petra Ernst, Hans-Joachim Hahn, Daniel Hoffmann, Dorothea Salzer (Hanover, Germany: Studienverlag) forthcoming
“The Yiddish-German Connection: New Directions,” Poetics Today (forthcoming; special issue on Yiddish, guest edited by Hana-Wirth Nesher)
“Heinrich Heine, Berthold Auerbach, and the Question of Bildung in German and German Jewish Culture,” Yearbook of the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, ed. William C. Donahue and Martha Helfer (forthcoming)
“Yiddish Writers and German Models in the Early Twentieth Century” (volume of German Jewish Transnationalism, eds. Leslie Morris and Jay Geller, volume currently under review with publisher)
“Fractured Histories: Heinrich Heine’s Responses to Violence and Revolution,” in Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture. Ed. Carl Niekerk and Stefani Engelstein. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 79. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2010. 67-87.
“Das Fortleben des Jiddischen vor und nach 1945: Übersetzungen und Transformationen,“ in Dialog der Disziplinen: Jüdische Studien und Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Eva Lezzi and Dorothea Seltzer. Minima Judaica 6. Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2009. 77-104.
“Pictures of Travel: Heine in America,” in German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation, ed. Lynne Tatlock and Matthew Erlin. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005.
“‘Die Beherrschung der Sprache’: Funktionen des Jiddischen in der deutschen Kultur von Heine bis Frenzel.” In: 1848 und das Versprechen der Moderne. Ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Helmut Schneider. Königshausen und Neumann, 2003. 165-178.
“Heine and Jewish Culture: The Poetics of Appropriation.” In: A Companion to Heinrich Heine, ed. Roger Cook. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002. 251-282.
“From East to West: Translating Y. L. Peretz in Early 20th-Century Germany.” In Orality, Textuality, and the Materiality of Jewish Tradition: Representations and Transformations, ed. Israel Gershoni and Yaakov Elman. New Haven: Yale UP. 2000. 278-309.
“Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Ideology: The Problem of Pluralism and the Absolute Difference of National Character - Or, where do the Jews fit in?” German Studies Review 20.1 (1997): 23-47.
“The Reception of Walter Benjamin in the Anglo-American Literary Institution.” The German Quarterly 65.3-4 (1992): 414-428.
Articles in Progress
“Franz Kafka: Prophet of the Holocaust or Avant-Garde Writer of His Time?” for Journal of the Kafka Society of America
Select Reviews
Review of Paul Reitter, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2008, in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Winter 2010 issue, vol. 28, no. 2.
Review of Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews and The Claims of Modernity. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Modern Language Review 100.3 (2005): 860-62.
Review of Contemporary Jewish Writing in German: An Anthology, ed. Leslie Morris and Karen Remmler. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Colloquia Germanica (Spring 2005).
Review of Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment. Ideas in Context Series. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (April 2004).
Awards and Grants
DAAD Research Award (Re-Visitation Program), 2011
Sesquicentennial Research Fellowship, University of Virginia, 2010-2011
Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellow, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2006-2007
NEH Fellow, Summer Institute, “German & European Studies in the U.S.: Changing World, Shifting Narratives,” organized by U of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005
Mead Endowment Teaching Award, 2003
Fulbright Fellow, German Studies Seminar: “History and Memory: Jewish
Present and Past in Germany,” 2000
Fellow, Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1995-1996
Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Grant – Israel Junior Researcher Award (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), 1992-1994
University of Texas Continuing Graduate Fellowship, 1991-1992
DAAD - Dissertation Research in Federal Republic of Germany, 1989-1990
University of Texas Continuing Graduate Fellowship, 1988-1989