פרופ' (אמריטוס) Michael P. Kramer

יחידה
Literature
דרגה
Professor Emeritus
דוא"ל
michael.kramer@biu.ac.il
משרד
Bldg. 404 room 064
שעות קבלה
S2: Tues by appt only
תחומי עניין

American Literature & Culture, Jewish American Thought & Writing, Jewish Literature, Religion & Literature, Creative Writing

קורות חיים
EDUCATION
 
Ph.D., English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1983.  Major field of concentration:  American Literature and Culture, 1620-1870.
M. Phil., with Distinction, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1977.
M.A., with Honors, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1975.
B.A., summa cum laude, Columbia College, Columbia University, 1974.
 
FACULTY POSITIONS
 
Professor Emeritus, Bar-Ilan University, till 120.
Associate Professor, Department of English, University of California, Davis, 1990-1997 (Assistant Professor, 1983-1990).
Visiting Professor, Departments of English and American Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991-1992, 1994-1997.
Lecturer, Department of English, Princeton University, 1981-1983.
Lecturer, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1978-1980.
Adjunct Instructor, Department of Language and Literature, Touro College, New York City, 1978-1980.
Adjunct Lecturer, English Department, City College of New York, CUNY, Fall 1977.
 
 
ADMINISTRATIVE AND OTHER ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE
 
Advisor, Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature, 2010-current/
Coordinator, Matanel Prize for Young Jewish Writers, 2012-2013.
Selection Committee, Grants in Literature, Israel Science Foundation, 2012, 2019.
Postdoctoral Selection Committee, USIEF (Fulbright Commission), 2011-2013.
International Selection Committee, Richard Ellmann Lectures on Modern Literature, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 2010.
Advisory Committee, Jewish Fiction .net, 2010-current.
Advisory Committee, Studies in American Jewish Literature, 2010-current.
Director, Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing, June 2006-December 2007; Chair, Steering Committee, -2020.
Director, Lechter Institute for Literary Study, Bar-Ilan University, 2004-2010.
Co-organizer, Kisufim: The Jerusalem Conference for Jewish Writers, 2006-current.
Advisor, Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, Jewish Book Council, New York City, 2006-current.
Chair, Department of English, Bar-Ilan University, 2001-2004.
Director, Anne Shachter Smith Project in Literature, Department of English, Bar-Ilan University, 2002-present.
Member, Academic Committee, Rothberg International School, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1999-current.
Member, Richard Beale Davis Prize Committee, Early American Literature, 1999.
Director, University of California Study Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1994-1996.
Graduate Adviser, Department of English, University of California, Davis, 1993-94.
Manuscript Reader, University of Chicago Press, University of California Press, Northeastern University Press, American Quarterly, Poetics Today, ESQ,, Western Folklore,  Journal of the Early Republic, etc.
Acting Coordinator of Writing Programs, Department of English, University of California, Davis, Spring 1993.
Chairman, Masters Committee, Department of English, University of California, Davis, 1984-1986.
Faculty Fellow, Stevenson Hall, Princeton University, 1982-1983.
Research Consultant, The Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, New York City, 1980-1981.
Assistant Coordinator, American Studies Program, Columbia University, 1977-1978.
Bibliographic Researcher, "A Library of American Puritan Writings:  The Seventeenth Century," ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, AMS Press, 1977.
Various graduate research positions, 1975-1977.
 
 
HONORS AND AWARDS
 
Fellow, Sami Rohr Institute for Jewish Literature, 2010-current.
Fellow, Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
Israel Science Foundation Research Grant, 2000-2002.
Fulbright Teaching Award, 1991-1992.
Humanities Institute Fellow, University of California, Davis, 1988-1989.
University of California, Davis, Faculty Development Awards, 1987-1988, 1988-1989.
University of California, Davis, Faculty Research Grant, 1983-1984, 1984-1985, 1985-1986, 1986-1987, 1988-1989, 1989-1990, 1990-1991, 1992-1994, 1996-97.
University of California, Davis, Junior Faculty Research Fellowship, 1984, 1985, 1987.
University of California, Davis, Undergraduate Instructional Improvement Program Award, 1984-1985, 1990-1991, 1993-94.
Columbia University Presidential Fellow, 1974-1975, 1975-1976, 1980-1981.
M. Phil. attained with distinction, 1977.
M.A. awarded with Honors, 1975.
B.A. awarded summa cum laude, 1974.  Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, 1974.
מחקר

American literature (Jewish American literature in particular), Jewish literature, Religion and Literature, and Creative Writing.

קורסים

37-931-01  The William Solomon Jewish Arts Seminar

 

 

 

פרסומים

 

         


Books:

  1. S.Y. Agnon, And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, Annotated Translation, Toby Press, 2017.
  2. The Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch, Ashgate Publishing (ed. with Nan Goodman), 2011.
  3. Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, University of Pennsylvania Press, (ed. with Scott Lerner and Sheila Jelen), 2010.
  4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Toby Press, 2003.
  5. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (ed. with Hana Wirth-Nesher), Cambridge University Press, 2003; reprinted Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2004.
  6. New Essays on Seize the Day, Cambridge University Press, (ed.) 1998; reprinted Peking University Press, 2007.
  7. Imagining Language in America, From the Revolution to the Civil War, Princeton University Press, 1992.

 

Journals Volumes Edited:

  1. The Literature of Jewish American Periodicals. Special Issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature (in progress).
  2. Before the Flood: Early Jewish American Writing.  Special Issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature (2014).
  3. Jewish American Writing: 350 New Years Later.  MAGGID: A Journal of Jewish Literature.  Volume I (2005).
  4. Jewish Lives: Memoirs and More.  MAGGID: A Journal of Jewish Literature.  Volume II (2006).
  5. Jewish Bodies: The Flesh Made Words.*  MAGGID: A Journal of Jewish Literature.  Volume III (2009).

 

Conference Catalogue Edited:

  1. Language and Memory  (Jerusalem: Mishkenot Sha'ananim, 2013).*
  2. Exile, Language, and the Jewish Writer (Jerusalem: Mishkenot Sha'ananim, 2009).* 

 

Interview:

"Before the Flood: An Interview with Michael P. Kramer," Religion in American History (April 2014).

 

Chapters in Books:

  1. "In Search of the Modern Jew" in Jews in the Gilded Age, eds. Jonathan Sarna and Adam Mendelssohn (Princeton, forthcoming).
  2. "Turn, Turn, Turn: Sacvan Bercovitch, Ecclesiastes, and American Literary Study," in The Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch, eds. Goodman and Kramer (Ashgate 2011), pp. 413-419.*
  3. "Biblical Typology and the Jewish American Imagination," in The Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch, eds. Goodman and Kramer, (Ashgate 2011), pp. 199-222.*
  4. "Intersections and Boundaries in Modern Jewish Literary Study," in Jelen, Kramer, and Lerner, eds., Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 1-23.  Co-authored with Sheila Jelen and Scott Lerner.*
  5. "The Art of Assimilation: Ironies, Ambiguities, Aesthetics," in Jelen, Kramer, and Lerner, eds., Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 303-326.*
  6. “There’s No Place Like Home: America, Israel and the (Mixed) Blessings of Assimilation,” in Simon J. Bronner, ed., Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity (Oxford, UK: Littman, 2009), pp. 316-323.*
  7. “Early Jewish American Writers,” in Stephen Norwood and Eunice Pollack, eds., Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, (ABC/Clio), 2008, vol. II, pp. 537-545.*
  8. “Beginnings and Ends: The Origins of Jewish American Literary History,” in Wirth-Nesher and Kramer, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 12-30.*
  9. “The Threshold of Hawthorne’s Romances,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Kramer, (Toby Press, 2003), pp. vii-xxix. * 
  10. “The Conversion of the Jews and Other Narratives of Self-Definition: Notes Toward the Writing of Jewish-American Literary History; or, Adventures in Hebrew School” in Ideology and Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. Emily Miller Budick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 177-196.
  11. “Judah Leib Lazerow’s The Staff of Judah,” in Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, eds., The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 476-519, 724-728.  Co-authored, translated, and annotated with Menahem Blondheim.
  12. “American Language,” in Paul Boyer, ed., The Oxford Companion to United States History (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 433-434.
  13. "W.E.B. Du Bois, American Nationalism, and the Jewish Question," in Reynolds J. Scott-Childress, ed., Race and the Construction of Modern American Nationalism  (New York:Garland Press, 1999), 169-194.
  14. “The Vanishing Jew: On Teaching Bellow’s Seize the Day as Ethnic Fiction,”  in Kramer, ed., New Essays on Seize the Day (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1-24.
  15. “Emma Lazarus Discovers America in ‘1492,” in Miriam Eliav-Feldon, ed., Following Columbus: America, 1492-1992 (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1996), pp. 159-171 [in Hebrew].
  16. "Perche' la lingua e' importante per il <<Federalist>>?" in Il Federalista:  200 Anni Dopo, ed. Guglielmo Negri (Bologna:  Societa edtrice il Mulino, 1988), pp. 369-392.
  17. "Condillac to Michaelis to Tooke:  How Noah Webster Invented a National Language; or, Was Tocqueville Wrong About American English?" in Steven Ickringill et al., eds., The Early Republic:  The Making of a Nation, the Making of a Culture (Amsterdam:  Free University Press, 1988), pp. 212-227.
  18. "Thomas Branagan," in American Writers of the Early National Period (DLB 37), ed., Emory Elliott (Detroit:  Gale Research/Brucolli-Clark Publishers, 1985). pp. 60-69.   
  19. "Jonathan Mayhew," in American Colonial Writers, 1735-1781 (DLB 31), ed., Emory Elliott (Detroit:  Gale Research/Brucolli-Clark Publishers, 1984), pp. 158-174.
  20. "Thomas Hutchinson," in American Colonial Writers, 1735-1781 (DLB 37), ed., Emory Elliott (Detroit:  Gale Research/Brucolli-Clark Publishers, 1984), pp. 123-129.
  21. "John Norton," in American Colonial Writers, 1606-1734 (DLB 24), ed., Emory Elliott (Detroit:  Gale Research/Brucolli-Clark Publishers, 1984), pp. 233-237.

 

Articles and Essays in Journals:

  1. "The Jews and the Jeremiad," Common-place 14:4 (2014).
  2. "Against the Tide: Rediscovering Early Jewish American Literary History," Studies in Anmerican Jewish Literature 33:1 (2014): 1-12.
  3. "Acts of Assimilation: The Invention of Jewish American Literary History," Jewish Quarterly Review 103:4 (Fall 2013): 556-579.
  4. "What I Think About When I Think About Creative Non-Fiction," Ilanot Review (Summer 2013).
  5. "The Wretched Refuse of Jewish American Literary History," Studies in American Jewish Literature 31:1 (2012): 61-75.*
  6. "Reflections on Jewish Storytelling," JewishStoryWriting.com (2012).
  7. “Up From Assent: Sacvan Bercovitch and the Theory of Assimilation,” RSA Journal  19 (2008): 101-106, 117-120.*
  8. “Nobodies,” Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature III-IV (2009): 5-21.*
  9. “Peklekh,” Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature II (2006): 3-12.*
  10. “Critical Narcissism and the Coming-of-Age of Jewish American Literary Studies,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94 (2004): 677-693.*
  11. “Voices: An American Gothic Tale; or, My Life With Jewish Literature,” Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature I (2005): 5-16.*
  12. “My Critics and Mai Nafka Mina: Further Reflections on Jewish Literary Historiography,” Prooftexts 21 (2001): 279-293.*
  13. "Race, Literary History, and the 'Jewish' Question," Prooftexts 21 (2001): 231-265.
  14. “Beyond Ambivalence: (Re)imagining Jewish American Culture; or, ‘Isn’t that the way the old assimilated story goes?’” American Jewish History 88 (2000): 407-415.
  15. “Imagining Authorship in America: ‘Whose American Renaissance?’ Revisited,” American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 108-125.
  16. “Assimilation in The Promised Land: Mary Antin and the Jewish Origins of the American Self,” Prooftexts 18 (1998): 121-148.
  17. "New English Typology and the Jewish Question," Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 3 (1992), 97-123.
  18. "The Study of Language and the American Renaissance:  An Essay in Literary Historiography, Part II," ESQ:  A Journal of the American Renaissance, 34 (4th Quarter 1988), 282-307.
  19. "The Study of Language and the American Renaissance:  An Essay in Literary Historiography, Part I," ESQ:  A Journal of the American Renaissance, 34 (3rd Quarter 1988), 207-227.
  20. "Horace Bushnell's Philosophy of Language Considered as a Mode of Cultural Criticism," American Quarterly 38 (1986), 573-590.
  21. "Critical Myths and Historical Realities; Or, How American Was the American Renaissance?"  Review, V (1983), 31-39.

 

Literary Translations:

1.       Robert Pinsky, Six Poems, Jerusalem: Kisufim & Mishkenot Shaananim, 2013 (trans. Hava Pinhas Cohen, edited, M.P. Kramer).

2.       S.Y. Agnon, "And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight," in JewishFiction.net 2::2 (2011). *

3.       Michal Govrin, "Between Two and Four," in Hold On to the Sun, ed. Judith Miller (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010), pp. 113-121.*

4.       Amir Gutfreund, "Wings," in Jewish Bodies: The Flesh Made Words, MAGGID: A Journal of Jewish Literature, Volume III (2009):135-144.*

5.       S.Y. Agnon, "Threee Short Tales," in Jewish Bodies: The Flesh Made Words, MAGGID: A Journal of Jewish Literature, Volume III (2009): 295-304.*

 

 Scholarly Reviews:

1. Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma in Common Knowledge 21:3 (2015): 522-523.

2. Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, trans. Ros Schwartz in Common Knowledge 21:1 (2014): 104.

3.  Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. and intro. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen, afterword Craig Calhoun in Common Knowledge 19:1 (2013): 148..

4.       Geoffrey Hartman, The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies, in Common Knowledge, 18:2 (2012): 372.

5.       Jurgen Habermas et al, An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age, in Common Knowledge 17:3 (2011): 538.

6.       Nora L. Rubel.  Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 30:1 (2011): 158-160.

7.       Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination in Common Knowledge  10:2 (2004): 362.

8.       Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction in Common Knowledge 10:1 (2004): 161.

9.       Maurice Wohlgelernter, Jewish Writers/Irish Writers: Selected Essays on the Love of Words and Norman Finkelstein, Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity in Studies in Contemporary Jewry XIX (2003): 287-289.

10.   Susan Mizruchi, ed., Religion and Cultural Studies in Common Knowledge 9:2 (2003): 355.

11.   Suzanne Klingenstein, Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990 in Studies in Contemporary Jewry 18 (2002): 300-301.   

12.   Siobhan Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard and Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled in American Literature (March 2003), 210-211.

13.   Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History  in Journal of the Early Republic 18 (1998), 164-165.

14.   Louise Barnett, Authority and Speech: Language, Society, and Self in the American Novel, in Modern Fiction Studies 41 (1995), 342-344.

15.   Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance in William and Mary Quarterly (July 1994), 539-541.

16.   Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America in The Journal of the Early Republic 14 (1994), 147-148.

17.    Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics Literature and the American Language, 1776-1865 in Early American Literature 28 (1993), 282-284.

18.    Richard M. Rollins, ed., The Autobiographies of Noah Webster:  From the Letters and  Essays, Memoir, and Diary, in New England Quarterly LXIV (1991), 148-151.

19.    Cynthia Jordan, Second Stories:  The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions, in American Literature 62 (1990), 501-502.

20.    Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England, in American Literature, 61 (1989), 688-689.

21.    Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying:  New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 88 (1989), 554-556.

22.    Albert Furtwangler, The Authority of Publius and David F. Epstein, The Political Theory of the Federalist, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 19 (1986), 450-54.

23.    B.R. Burg, Richard Mather, in Early American Literature, XVIII (1983-84), 292-293.

24.    Philip F. Gura, The Wisdom of Words:  Language, Theology and Literature in the New England Renaissance, in American Literature, 54 (1982), 296-298.

25.    W. Clark Gilpin, The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams, in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XI (1981), 740-741.

26.    James Dougherty, The Fivesquare City:  The City in the Religious Imagination, in The Notre Dame English Journal, XIII (1980), 71-73.

Other Publications:

1.       Resource Manual for America in Literature, vol. 1, "The First Two Hundr​ed Years," eds. David Levin and Theodore Gross (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977), pp. 1-79. 

 

 

 

באמצעי התקשורת

Visit my Amazon Author page

My Retirement Party

Podcast: An Interview on Translating Agnon, with Marcela Sulak

Op-Ed: What Did Emma Lazarus Really Have in Mind?

Op-Ed: On Leonard Cohen & the Jewish Tradition

Introducing Margaret Atwood at Emory University

Lecture: Assimilation: Toward a Theory of Jewish American Literary History (December 2012)

Not for the faint of heart: Hanukkah 5773

"Before the Flood: An Interview with Michael P. Kramer"

 

תאריך עדכון אחרון : 07/06/2022