
Contact Information
3106 FLB
707 S Mathews
M/C 160
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
Brett Ashley Kaplan received her Ph.D. from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and is now a Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies. Her first books, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (2007) and Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory (2011), examine the Shoah’s intersections with art and space. Turning to race in art and literature, she has published Jewish Anxiety in the Novels of Philip Roth (2015). She is the editor of Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2023) and co-editor (with Anthony Russell and Sara Feldman) of the collection in progress, Blewish: Contemporary Black-Jewish Voices. Her first novel, Rare Stuff was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2022, and she is at work on a second novel, Vandervelde Downs. She teaches classes in Jewish American Literature in Dialogue with U.S. Minority Cultures, Literary Responses to the Holocaust, Introduction to Theory, Introduction to Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies, Memory and Objects, and single author/auteur classes on J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais.
Research Interests
Holocaust art and literature
Jewish American literature
race and ethnicity in contemporary visual and performance art
Education
Ph.D. Berkeley, Rhetoric, 2002
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Program in Comparative and World Literature
Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Professor, Program in Jewish Culture and Society
Professor, French and Italian
Professor, Center for Global Studies
Recent Publications
Kaplan, B. A. (Ed.) (Accepted/In press). Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches. Bloomsbury Academic.
Kaplan, B. A., & Kessler, S. J. (2022). "Portnoy's Complaint at 50": A Podcast About Roth's Most Infamous Book. Philip Roth Studies, 18(1), 131-132. https://doi.org/10.1353/prs.2022.0010
Kaplan, B. A. (2022). Rare Stuff. Spuyten Duyvil.
Kaplan, B. A. (2022). Review of Ira Nadel, Philip Roth: A Counterlife: Fiction as Revenge. Cercles, Cercles. http://www.cercles.com/review/r91/Nadel.html
Kaplan, B. A. (2022, Jul 13). Uncovering Rare Stuff: Interview with Jessica Hammie, Smile Politely . https://www.smilepolitely.com/arts/uncovering_rare_stuff_with_brett_ashley_kaplan/