Tag Archives: 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 »

PhD Candidate Contact florian.geddes@mail.utoronto.ca Courses 2025-26 GER 300Y1 L0101 Intermediate German II, MW 11am–1pm GER 401HS L0101 Advanced German II, TR 9–11am BMS 331H1S The History of the Book: Elements of Bibliography and Print Culture, W 3–5pm Office Hours Mondays, 2–3pm Odette Hall, Room 307 Research My dissertation focuses on late medieval and early modern German heroic poetry collections known as “Heldenbücher” (working title: The Making of the ‘Book of Heroes’ (15th/16th c.): Textuality, Materiality, and the History of the Book). In my research, I combine literary theory with methods from the field of book history, thus reading the corpus of the Books of Heroes not only as compilations of poetic texts but also as material artifacts. As a result, my work revolves around the production and reception of heroic poetry between manuscript and print culture, transformation and adaptation processes throughout the textual history of individual poems, and the many ways in which manual labor, material, and text intersected in creating the Books of Heroes. As part of a five-year project on “Medieval Undergrounds” (PI: Prof. Markus Stock) generously funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, I work on literary and visual representations of the subterranean in Middle High ... Read More »