2021 Alumni
Jenna Stover Kemp
Jenna Stover-Kemp works in the area of Hebrew Bible and is interested in cultural memory and intertextuality. Her dissertation traces three case studies from different literary genres and analyzes how relatively late biblical authors work with the memory of earlier text. Principally, she is interested in how forgetting is an aide to the preservation of cultural memory and the formation of literary canon.
Danny Luzon
Danny Luzon earned his PhD in the Department of Comparative Literature. His dissertation studied Jewish-American multilingual literary responses to assimilationist pressures during the mass migration era. He focuses on works written in English, Hebrew and Yiddish in which the modernist “universalist” turn “inward” – into depicting one’s interiority – is complicated through the exploration of linguistic particularity and multilingual potentiality.
Danny specializes in literary modernisms, theories of the novel, language and translation studies, and feminist and critical theory, which he puts in various conversations with American, Hebrew and Yiddish literatures. He has organized several working groups in Yiddish, Hebrew and Jewish studies, and is a member of the Transnational & Ethnic American Studies working group.
Shmaryahu Brownstein
Shmary Brownstein received a Bachelor’s equivalent during his studies at the Rabbinical College of America in Morristown, NJ. He received his Master’s degree in Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in 2014. He entered the doctoral program at the Near Eastern Studies department at UC Berkeley that same year. During his time in the program he has studied Biblical criticism, rabbinics, and modern Hebrew literature, among other subjects. Shmary is currently working on his dissertation project, which focuses on Habad Hasidism and the thought of the seventh Habad rebbe, R. Menahem Mendel Schneerson. He draws on theories of intertextuality and Midrashic studies, and uses them as a lens to examine the ways R. Schneerson uses the rabbinic and Hasidic tradition that comes down to him in his own thought, and how these methods map on to his negotiation of his own position as leader of the Habad movement vis-a-vis his predecessors.