Susanne Klingenstein
she, her
Susanne Klingenstein received her first Certificate of Distinction in Teaching at Harvard College in 1989 before obtaining her PhD in American Studies at the University of Heidelberg in 1990. She published two books on the integration of Jewish literary scholars into American academe (1991, 1998) while serving at MIT as assistant and associate professor of Writing and Humanistic Studies (1993-2001). At MIT she developed humanistic studies courses for premedical students. She left MIT in 2001 to serve as Lecturer in the Humanities in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), based at Harvard Medical School, where she developed, implemented and oversaw HST’s Communications Curriculum, trained medical scientists in clear writing, and taught courses on the humanistic components of medical thinking and practice evolving out of western philosophical and theological traditions. She left HST in 2015 to study Russian full-time (2015-2017) and to devote herself more intensely to the study of German Jewish and Yiddish book cultures. She has published a study of the Yiddish writer Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh and the emergence of modern Yiddish fiction in 19th-century Eastern Europe (2014), a study of the German novelist Martin Walser (2016), a short biography of Moyshe Kulbak (2017), translations into German of central works by Abramovitsh and Chaim Grade (2019, 2021), and the first volume of a cultural history of Yiddish literature, covering the years 1105 to 1597 (2022). Her current project is writing the second volume, covering the years 1592 to 1815. Her works on Yiddish were published in Germany. Since 1998 she has been working as literary critic and cultural correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.