The 2021 Levy Symposium

Rachel Cordasco has a PhD in literary studies and currently works as a developmental editor. She founded the website SFinTranslation.com in 2016, writes reviews for World Literature Today and Strange Horizons, and translates Italian speculative fiction, some of which has been published in magazines like Clarkesworld Magazine and Future Science Fiction Digest. Her translation (with Jennifer Delare) of Clelia Farris's collection Creative Surgery came out in September 2020 from Rosarium Publishing. Rachel’s book Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation From the Cold War to the New Millennium is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

Dr. Dimitra Fimi is Senior Lecturer in Fantasy and Children’s Literature and co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. She has published two award-winning monographs on J.R.R. Tolkien and on Celtic-inspired children’s fantasy, and she has co-edited original manuscripts by Tolkien on linguistic invention. She has also published on worldbuilding, medievalism, children’s literature, and adaptation. She sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and the Journal of Tolkien Research, and she co-edits the new Perspectives on Fantasy book series (Bloomsbury Academic). She often contributes to TV and radio programmes on fantasy. Many of her published essays and articles are available open access here: http://dimitrafimi.com/.

Ruth Franklin is a book critic, a biographer, and a former editor at The New Republic. Her work appears in many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Her biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others.

Tamar Hess is Sidney and Betty Sarah Berg senior lecturer of Hebrew and chair of the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has studied Hebrew autobiography as in her Self As Nation: Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography (Brandies UP, 2016), and is currently engaged in a study of contemporary Hebrew feminist orthodox poetry. 

Maud Kozodoy is a Senior Editor on the staff of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, and was recently Senior Editor at Inference: International Review of Science. Her background is in medieval Jewish history and the history of science. She received a Ph.D. in Medieval Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and her book, The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus: Profayt Duran and Jewish Identity in Late Medieval Iberia, was published by UPenn Press in 2015.

The Reverend Christopher Martin is rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, CA. He completed both his B.A. and his Masters of Divinity at Yale University, and has served churches in Seattle, Hartford and Los Angeles. He is the author of books on Christian devotion and discipleship, including With Gladness: Answering God's Call in Our Everyday Lives (2021) and The Restoration Project (2014), and his review of the Kierkegaard study Repetition and Identity recently appeared in the Anglican Theological Review.

Annegret Oehme is an Assistant Professor in the German Studies Department at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her Ph.D. in 2016 in German from Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill through the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies. Her research interests include medieval and early modern German and Yiddish literature, and pre-modern cultural transfers within a German-Jewish context. Her publications on Old Yiddish literature, early modern marriage treatises, and a graphic novel have appeared in The German Quarterly, Ashkenaz, Daphnis, and Arthuriana among other journals. Her book, He Should Have Listened to his Wife, (De Gruyter, 2020) explores the construction of female figures in Middle High German and Yiddish adaptations of an Arthurian Romance.  Her book on German-Yiddish Arthurian adaptation tradition is scheduled to be published with Brill later this year. 

Adam Roberts is a writer and Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published a History of Science Fiction (2nd ed Palgrave 2006) and twenty-one novels, most recently Purgatory Mount (Gollancz 2021). His It's The End of the World (But What Are We Really Afraid Of?) (Elliott and Thompson 2020) has been shortlisted for the 2021 BSFA Award.

Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver, where he has taught since 2008. His acclaimed book, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel, was published by NYU Press in December 2014. Adam’s academic articles and general interest journalism have appeared in numerous outlets in the US and UK.

Michael Weingrad is Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University. He is the author of American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States (2011), the editor and translator of Letters to America: Selected Poems of Reuven Ben-Yosef (2015), and is currently working on a study of Jews and fantasy literature. He is a regular contributor to the Jewish Review of Books and Mosaic, and his essays and reviews can be found at www.investigationsandfantasies.com.