Gabriella Safran
Eva Chernov Lokey Professor of Jewish Studies
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
Senior Associate Dean, Humanities and Arts
Chair of Graduate Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures
1998: Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University.
1990: B.A., magna cum laude, with honors in Soviet and East European Studies, Yale University.
Gabriella Safran has written on Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures. Her most recent monograph, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard, 2010), is a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, a revolutionary, and a wartime relief worker.
Safran teaches and writes on Russian literature, Yiddish literature, folklore, and folkloristics. She is now working on two monograph projects: one on how people in the Russian Empire listened across social lines, recorded and imitated others’ voices in various media, and reflected on listening and vocal imitation, from the 1830s to the 1880s, and the other on the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.
