Susanne Klingenstein
Brandeis University
Susanne Klingenstein joined the English Department at Harvard in 1987 as a graduate student from Germany to conduct research for her dissertation on the integration of Jewish literary scholars into America English departments. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1990 and published her extensive research in two volumes Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940 (Yale UP 1991) and Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990 (Syracuse UP). After serving as Lecturer in American Literature at Harvard until 1992, and receiving a Danforth Teaching Award, she joined the faculty in the Program of Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT in 1992, teaching writing and European literature and history. At MIT she developed courses in humanistic thinking for premedical students. In 2001 she left MIT as Associate Professor and joined the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), based at Harvard Medical School, as Lecturer in Humanistic Studies where she developed a communication curriculum for HST’s M.D.-Ph.D. students. She left HST in 2015 to study Russian at Brandeis University (until 2017) as part of her return to full-time Yiddish literary scholarship. In 2014, she published monograph on the 19th-century Yiddish writer Mendele Moykher Sforim (Mendele der Buchhändler, Wiesbaden), followed in 2016 by a memoir of her long friendship and collaboration with the German writer Martin Walser (Wege mit Martin Walser, Frankfurt). Retracing the development of the mega-writer Walser as cultural phenomenon in post-war Germany, sharpened her view of the sociological, economic and political factors that create a national literature. She is bringing these observations (as well as her studies with Prof. David Stern on the development of Hebrew books as material objects) to bear on her extensive current project, which is a cultural history of Yiddish literature from 1105-2010. Its first volume Es kann nicht jeder ein Gelehrter sein: Eine Kulturgeschichte der jiddischen Literatur, 1105-1597, was published in 2022 in Berlin. She is now working on the second volume, covering the years 1592-1797 and the rise of women as one of several decisive factors in the production of Yiddish books.