Gabriella Safran

Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies, Professor and Director, Slavic Languages and Literatures,
Chair, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

Focal Groups:
Humanities Education
Performance

Contact:

Building 260, Room 109
Phone: 650 723 4414
gsafran@stanford.edu

Office Hours:

Thursdays 10-12

BIO:

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.

CURRICULUM VITAE:

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EDUCATION:

Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, 1998.
B.A., magna cum laude, with honors in Soviet and East European Studies, Yale University, 1990.

Courses

SLAVIC

194/394

Russia: Literature, Film, Identity, Alterity

Aut

2012-13

How do Russian literature and film imagine Russian identity – and, in contrast, the ethnic or national Other? Does political and literary theory analyzing national identity and the literary imagination elsewhere hold true in the Russian context? Texts include works by Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Blok, Mayakovsky, Platonov; Soviet and post-Soviet films; theory and history. Recommended for returnees from Moscow, Slavic majors, and CREEES MA students. Accepted for IR credit. Readings in English and films subtitled; additional section for Russian readers. Taught in English.
SLAVIC

225

Readings in Russian Realism

Spr

2012-13

For graduate students or upper-level undergraduates. What did Realism mean for late imperial Russian writers? What has it meant for twentieth-century literary theory? As we seek to answer these questions, we read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov, alongside their brilliant but less often taught contemporaries such as Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leskov, Garshin, Korolenko, Gorky, Andreev, and Bunin. Reading in Russian; discussion in English.

Publications

Nathans, Benjamin, and Gabriella Safran Culture front : representing Jews in Eastern Europe. Philadelphia Pa. {;Bristol}: University of Pennsylvania Press {;;University} Presses Marketing [distributor], 2007.
Safran, Gabriella. "Jews as Siberian Natives: Primitivism and S. An-sky's Dybbuk." Modernism/modernity. 13 (2006): 635-655.
Safran, Gabriella, et al. The worlds of S. An-sky : a Russian Jewish intellectual at the turn of the century. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Safran, Gabriella. "Andrei Makine's Literary Bilingualism and the Critics." Comparative Literature. 55 (2003): 246-265.
Safran, Gabriella. "Isaak Babel's El'ia Isaakovich as a New Jewish Type." Slavic Review. 61 (2002): 253-272. Abstract
Safran, Gabriella Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Contraversions). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Safran, Gabriella. "Dancing with Death and Salvaging Jewish Culture in Austeria and The Dybbuk." Slavic Review. 59 (2000): 761-781.
Safran, Gabriella. "Ethnography, Judaism, and the Art of Nikolai Leskov." Russian Review. 59 (2000): 235-251.
Safran, Gabriella. "Love Songs between the Sacred and the Vernacular: Pushkin's "Podrazhaniia" in the Context of Bible Translation." The Slavic and East European Journal. 39 (1995): 165-183.

Gabriella Safran