Tag Archives: Miriam Borden

Miriam Borden

PhD Student Contact miriam.borden@mail.utoronto.ca Office Hours tba Background I hold a B.A. in Jewish Studies (Hons., 2014) and an M.A. in Yiddish Studies (2018) from the University of Toronto. Through the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture, I pursue research interests in postwar Yiddish culture, Yiddish publishing, and the material history of Yiddish libraries and sound archives. On the side, I love to research the food history of Jewish immigrants in the twentieth century. My dissertation research is on the Canadian-American Yiddish folksong collector Ruth Rubin, who amassed an archive of over 2,000 Yiddish songs from Jewish immigrants between the 1940s and the 1960s. I am a frequent researcher at the Ontario Jewish Archives Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre, where I have worked as an Assistant Archivist and translator. Through the Archives, I lead public and private walking tours of the historically Jewish Kensington Market neighbourhood; when possible, I like to include Yiddish sources such as newspaper articles, advertisements, and poetry by Yiddish writers from the 1920s and 1930s. I have researched and translated portions of Toronto’s Yiddish daily newspaper, Der Yidisher Zhurnal, and written for the Canadian Jewish News on ... Read More »

Jacob Hermant

PhD Student Contact jacob.hermant@mail.utoronto.ca Office Hours tba Courses GER 360HF Intermediate Yiddish, Fall 2023 Background My research focuses on representations of nature and climate in diasporic Jewish literatures, specifically from Yiddish, German, and English, as well as 20th-century Jewish thought. I also work more broadly on Yiddish and Jewish literary studies and cultural history. I received my BA in 2020 from the University of King’s College in Halifax, with combined honours in Contemporary Studies and Theatre, and a minor in Early Modern Studies. I completed my MA in 2021 at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature and the collaborative program in Jewish Studies, and I began my doctoral studies in 2022 in the Yiddish stream of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, as well as the collaborative program in Jewish Studies. Read More »

Florian Geddes

PhD Student Contact florian.geddes@mail.utoronto.ca Background My dissertation focuses on the corpus of late medieval and early modern books of heroes (working title: The Making of the ‘Book of Heroes’ (15th/16th c.): Textuality, Materiality, and the History of the Book), combining literary analysis with questions of materiality and book history. I am interested in the production and reception of epic poems between manuscript and print culture, the transformation processes throughout the textual history of these poems, and the ways in which manual labor, material, and text intersected in making books of heroes. Scholarships and Awards Connaught International Scholarship, University of Toronto, 2019 Iter Graduate Fellowship, University of Toronto, 2019 Deutschlandstipendium, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt (Main), 2013-2015 Conference Papers “Old Tales in a New Medium: On the Prefaces of Printed Books of Heroes (1479–1590 CE),” Cologne-Toronto Graduate Student Colloquium 2019. Read More »