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 Program in Jewish Culture & Society and 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 more recently to race in art and literature, she has published Jewish Anxiety in the Novels of Philip Roth (2015) and is working on a project tentatively entitled jewblack is blackjew: tensions, intersections, and interactions among jewishness and blackness in contemporary art. 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, and single author/auteur classes on J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, 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
Recent Publications
Goldman, D. E., & Kaplan, B. A. (2021). Twenty-First-Century Jewish Writing and the World. American Literary History, 33(4), 703-708. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab072
Kaplan, B. A., & Taub, N. (2021). The Black-Jewish Matrix. In M. McKinley (Ed.), Philip Roth in Context (pp. 252-262). (Literature in Context). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108776547.030
Kaplan, B. A. (2021). Too painful to forget, too painful to remember: Ashes of memory in Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Duras’s La douleur (1985). Memory Studies, 14(4), 834-855. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020988773
Kaplan, B. A. (2020). An Interview with Nicole Krauss. Contemporary Literature, 61(3), 283-302. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/800248
Kaplan, B. A. (2020). “Grotesquery to the Surface”: The Leo Frank Case and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America revisited in Trump’s alt-right America. Studies in American Jewish Literature, 39(1), 44-72. [751603]. https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerjewilite.39.1.0044