Gabriella Safran has written on Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures. Her most recent book, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard, 2010), is a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, a revolutionary, and a wartime relief worker.
Safran teaches and writes on Russian literature, Yiddish literature, folklore, and folkloristics. She is now working on two projects: a monograph investigating nineteenth-century short Russian and Yiddish fiction in the context of the history of listening, and an article looking at the interaction of the Russian and Jewish rhetorical traditions among early-twentieth-century revolutionaries.
As the chair of the DLCL, Safran is increasingly interested in the reorganization of humanities departments and the implications of that for teaching, learning, and scholarship.
