Contact Information
3080 Flb
707 S Mathews
M/C 160
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
Brett Ashley Kaplan received her Ph.D. from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and is now a Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies. Her first books, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (2007) and Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory (2011), examine the Shoah’s intersections with art and space. Turning to race in art and literature, she has published Jewish Anxiety in the Novels of Philip Roth (2015). She is the editor of Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2023) and co-editor (with Anthony Russell and Sara Feldman) of the collection in progress, Blewish: Contemporary Black-Jewish Voices. Her first novel, Rare Stuff was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2022, and she is at work on a second novel, Vandervelde Downs. She teaches classes in Jewish American Literature in Dialogue with U.S. Minority Cultures, Literary Responses to the Holocaust, Introduction to Theory, Introduction to Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies, Memory and Objects, and single author/auteur classes on J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais.
Research Interests
Holocaust art and literature
Jewish American literature
race and ethnicity in contemporary visual and performance art
Education
Ph.D. Berkeley, Rhetoric, 2002
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Program in Comparative and World Literature
Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Professor, Program in Jewish Culture and Society
Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Professor, French and Italian
Professor, School of Art and Design
Professor, Center for Global Studies
Recent Publications
Kaplan, B. A. (2024). Review: H.S. Flanzbaum's The Holocaust across Borders: Trauma, Atrocity, and Representation in Literature and Culture. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Article dcae009. https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcae009
Kaplan, B. A. (2023). Converged Aesthetics: Blewishness in the Work of Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell. Arts, 12(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040178
Kaplan, B. A. (Ed.) (2023). Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches. Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350233164
Kaplan, B. A. (2023). Introduction. In Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches (pp. 1-8). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350233164.ch-i
Kaplan, B. A. (2023). Roth Abroad. In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth (pp. 303-315). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc..