COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Marcus Moseley received his M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh and his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1990 in Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He was awarded a Koret Foundation Jewish Studies Publication Program prize for his book, Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford University Press, 2005), which investigates the development of autobiography among the Jews in Eastern Europe from the 19th century to the period just around World War I. His focus in this book is on works written in Hebrew, but he also spends a significant amount of time considering Yiddish and German works as well as the interaction among these languages of Jewish expression in this period. He is now working on his next book, From People of the Book to Literary Nation: On the Emergence of Literature in Jewish Eastern Europe, which describes the rise of the new phenomenon of literature in Jewish Eastern Europe of the 18th and 19th centuries. In exploring the cultural, social and ideological ramifications of the painful transition from "people of the book" to "literary nation" as experienced by the secular, or secularizing, sector of East European Jewry, Moseley sheds light on how Jewish writers and (even more importantly) readers began to construct modern Jewish identity. In 1992 Moseley initiated a project to prepare an English language anthology of the interwar YIVO youth autobiography collections housed in the YIVO Archives, for which he received a major grant from the National Endowment of Humanities. He chaired the editorial committee for this volume,Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002), to which he also contributed an introduction.

Dr. Moseley has taught a wide variety of courses on Hebrew and Yiddish literature at graduate and undergraduate levels at the Universities of New York, Harvard, Oxford and Johns Hopkins. He has close links with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, where he worked as an Assistant Archivist from 1987-91.

Specific interests to Comparative Literary Studies: Hebrew literature; Yiddish literature; autobiography.