Receiving the Karasik award will help me immeasurably in my scholarly and professional development in the fields of Jewish Studies and Memory Studies. I will be proud to represent the University of Illinois’s Program in Jewish Culture and Society both at home and abroad by making what I believe are important contributions to this discursive field. 

I will use the award to attend two conferences in December 2018: The Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation: The Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma conference being held on 5 –8 December 2018 at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa, and the 2018 Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, which will take place on 16 –18 December 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts. Both of these conferences will provide invaluable opportunities for scholarly and professional development as I move forward towards completing my doctoral dissertation, the working title of which is Distant Proximities: Whiteness and Worldedness in Transnational Jewish Literature since 1945.