People

Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish and Diaspora Studies Contact info anna.shternshis@utoronto.ca Office Anne Tanenbaum CJS Jackman Humanities Building Room 218, 170 St. George Street Toronto, ON, M5R 2M8 Phone (416) 978 8131 Secretary: 416-926-2324 Office Hours On leave fall 2021 Classes 2021-2022 On leave fall 2021 Background Anna Shternshis holds the position of Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish studies and the director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree (D.Phil) in Modern Languages and Literatures from Oxford University in 2001. Shternshis is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). She is the co-editor-in-chief of East European Jewish Affairs. Shternshis created and directed the Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory project, together with an artist Psoy Korolenko, the initiative that brought back to life the forgotten Yiddish music written during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. She lectures widely around the world and is a frequent guest on radio and TV shows worldwide (CBC, NPR, BBC, ... Read More »

Chair [on leave Fall 2022] & Associate Professor of German Contact info stefan.soldovieri@utoronto.ca St. George Campus Office University of Toronto Odette Hall 320 50 St. Joseph Street Toronto, ON M5S 3L5 Phone: 416-926-2323 Secretary: 416-926-2324 Office Hours tba Classes 2022-2023 On leave Fall 2022 Background Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison BA Duke University Freie Universität Berlin Universität Freiburg Teaching Interests German Cinema and Cinema Studies, 20th-21st Century German Literature and Cultural Studies, Cold War Culture, Popular Culture, The Future, Tactical German Studies Research Interests Remaking the Movies in German Cinemas: Art, Industry, Globalization The project opens up a new perspective on German cinema, examining the largely unappreciated role of the remake in the history of German cinemas from the beginnings of the medium in the mid-1890s to our multi-media and global present. Considering German reprises of domestic and international precursors, foreign reworkings of German classics, and concept films that self-consciously reflect on the idea of remaking itself, I explore the different modes of remaking as historically shifting and multivalent forms of cultural recycling. The remake phenomenon highlights the tensions between art and industry that are frequently ignored in German film studies. The project’s attention to the frequently transnational valence of the ... Read More »

Principal, University College Vice-Dean, College Relations, Faculty of Arts and Science Professor of German and Medieval Studies Contact info markus.stock@utoronto.ca Office University College 15 King’s College Circle, Room 165 Toronto, ON M5S 3H7 CANADA Tel. 416-978-7516 Office Hours Mondays 4:15-5:45pm, UC 165, and by appointment: Please contact uc.principal@utoronto.ca Classes 2023-24 GER 426/GER1200 Introduction to Medieval German Language and Literature, Fall Term, Mondays 2-4pm, UC 177 Background Dr. phil. University of Göttingen, 2000 Markus Stock teaches German languages, literatures, and cultures of the Middle Ages. He is cross-appointed to the Centre for Medieval Studies, where he teaches courses on medieval German romance and heroic epic, philological methodologies, and Old Saxon. Markus Stock supervises MA and PhD students specializing in medieval and early modern (pre-1600) German literature and culture. He currently accepts supervisions of individuals who wish to specialize in these areas in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures or the Centre for Medieval Studies. Potential applicants are invited to send informal email inquiries to him. Markus Stock’s SSHRC-funded research and his teaching are situated in medieval German literatures, manuscript studies, and digital philology. He also directs the international research project Medieval Undergrounds, funded by SSHRC. He has authored, edited, or ... Read More »

Professor of German and Comparative Literature Contact info john.zilcosky@utoronto.ca Office University of Toronto Odette Hall 303 50 St. Joseph Street Toronto, ON M5S 3L5 Secretary: 416-926-2324 Office Hours Wednesdays, 4-5 pm, Odette Hall 303 Classes 2023-2024 GER 1722 “Kafka” COL 5149 “The Art of Combat: Violence, Culture, and Competition”   Background John Zilcosky is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where he writes about modern European literature, psychoanalysis, the art of travel, and the history of sports. His books include Kafka’s Travels (MLA Scaglione Prize winner for best book in German Studies), Writing Travel, Uncanny Encounters, The Allure of Sports, The Language of Trauma, and Alternative Temporalities. The Times Literary Supplement and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung have reviewed his work. The Humboldt Foundation, the US National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council have granted fellowships to him, and he is honorary president of the International Comparative Literature Association’s Research Committee on Literary Theory. The German government awarded him the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize for outstanding achievements in research in 2018. In 2022-23, he won a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, supporting research on his book ... Read More »

Sessional Lecturer Contact alma.botcharova@utoronto.ca Office Hours Mon & Wed 1-2 and by appointment Read More »

Course Instructor Background My name is Lisa Lackner and I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Languages and Literacies program (LLE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). My research focuses on language policy, second language learning and plurilingualism. In my work, I am also engaging with theoretical perspectives that bring together language and race. I was awarded the Connaught International Scholarship in 2020 and the Mary H. Beatty Fellowship for the academic year of 2022/23. Before my studies at the University of Toronto, I spent many years working as a middle school teacher. To better understand my practice and experience as a teacher at school, I began studying German as a second/foreign language at the University of Vienna. For my MA thesis, I investigated teachers’ perspectives on second language policy, and I received my MA degree from the University of Vienna in 2018. In the classroom, I am striving to provide an engaging and supportive environment for students. Embracing the complex and dynamic characteristics of language not only shapes my own understanding of language teaching but also my lesson planning. When I am not in the classroom teaching or researching, I enjoy reading, yoga and excellent (Viennese!) ... Read More »

Course Instructor Contact anne.popovich@mail.utoronto.ca Office Hours Mon & Wed 5:30-6 and 8 -8:30 p.m. or by appointment Classes 2021-22 GER300Y1 (L5101), Mon & Wed 6-8 Read More »

Course Instructor Contact felix.roessler@mail.utoronto.ca Office Hours tba Classes 2021-22 tba Read More »

Course Instructor Contact miriam.schulz@utoronto.ca Office Hours tba Classes 2021-22 GER1050H F Read More »

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 »