2016 Alumni

Anna Elena TorresAnna Elena Torres

Anna Elena Torres is the Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She received a PhD from UC Berkeley, with a dissertation titled “‘With an Undone Shirt (Mit a tseshpilyet hemd)’: Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature.” This research documents anarchist diasporism and analyzes its influence in Yiddish modernism, in such works as Peretz Markish’s poema Der fertsikyeriker man (The Man of Forty). Torres’s other work includes translating Dvoyre Fogel’s poetry collection Manekinen (1934).

Mandy CohenMandy Cohen

Madeleine Cohen received her PhD in Comparative Literature with a designated emphasis in Jewish Studies in 2016. Her dissertation, entitled “Here and Now: The Modernist Poetics ofDo’ikayt,” explores connections between the representation of place in modernist Yiddish literature and revolutionary, anti-territorialist politics in the interwar period. She is currently the Preceptor in Yiddish at Harvard University and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Her aliases include Mandy and Mindl.