LINCOLN SHLENSKY, Ph.D.

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Comparative Literature (English, French, Hebrew)
University of California, Berkeley                                                       2003

M.A., Comparative Literature (English, French)
University of California, Berkeley                                                        1991

B.A., magna cum laude, Semiotics (honors), Brown University         1987

ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS

“The Postcolonial Jamaica Kincaid,” Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium, University of South Alabama, Mobile, April, 2005

“Traumatic Modernism: Aharon Appelfeld’s Literary Politics,” Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Chicago, December 19, 2004.

“Traumas of Remembrance and Repetition,” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia, March 3-7, 2004

“Modernist Minimalism and the Early Israeli Statehood Years,” Mississippi Philological Society Annual Conference, Columbia, MS, January 30-31, 2004

“Narrative Thresholds: Repetition in Édouard Glissant,” Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, San Diego, April 5, 2003

“Modernity’s Apparitions: Édouard Glissant and the Creolization of Memory,” invited lecture, University of South Alabama, Mobile, January, 2003

“Trauma as National Narrative: Collective Memory in Aharon Appelfeld’s Mikhvat Ha-or,” Annual Conference of the Modern Language Association, Chicago, Winter 1999, “Literature and Memory” session, organized by David Jacobson (Hebrew Literature Discussion Group)

“The Emergence of Cultural and Political Collective Memory” (on David Grossman’s See Under: Love, Lawrence Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies and Jonathan David Harris’s documentary film, The Long Way Home).  The Academic Consortium, March 7, 2000, Symposium on David Grossman’s See Under: Love.

“Finitude’s Score (Book Review),” Poetics Today 18:1 Spring 1997, pp. 132-4.

“Preside at Their Pleasures: Rousseau, Diderot, Kafka and the Ambivalence of Representation,” Qui Parle 6:1 Fall/Winter 1992, pp. 52-92.

DISSERTATION

“Resituations: Repetition, Nationalism, and the Traumas of Modernity in the Writing of Aharon Appelfeld and Édouard Glissant,” 398 pp, University of California, Berkeley, December 2003. 

Thesis: The works of Aharon Appelfeld and Édouard Glissant present a challenge to collective representational codes that achieved dominance prior to the Second World War within their respective societies, Israel and Martinique.  Responding to the Modernist emphasis on ‘return’ that is evident in both the Césairean theme of retour and in neo-Romantic Hebrew literature’s nostalgia for origins, Glissant and Appelfeld formulated distinctive literary idioms that are unexpectedly comparable in their use of the figure of repetition.  Both authors use formal and thematic repetition in order to indicate a collective unwillingness to remember the pain and degradation of the traumatic past, and also to interrogate cultural refusal to recognizing continuities between past and present.  They engage in a parallel attempt  to draw attention to and reclaim rejected memory and the marginalized social formations that coalesce around it.  The dislocating but potentially transformative figure of repetition signals, in their writings, history’s haunting force in the postcolonial and post-Shoah conditions.

Committee:  Professor Chana Kronfeld (Co-Chair); Professor Michael Lucey (Co-Chair); Professor Daniel Boyarin

Ph.D. Qualifying Examination fields: American (19th and 20th centuries), francophone Caribbean, and Hebrew film and literature.

OTHER PRESENTATIONS

Panel Chair, “Constructing Jewish American Identity,” Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Chicago, December 20, 2004.

Presenter and Panelist, “Is Peace Between Israel and the Palestinians Possible?” (with co-panelist Professor Farid Abdel-Nour, moderated by Professor Peter Drier), Occidental College, Los Angeles, October 23, 2002

Presenter and Panelist, “Middle East Peace Process,” World Affairs Council of Northern California, Great Decisions Series 2002 (with Hanan Rasheed, moderated by Marsha Vande Berg), February 19, 2002  See: http://wacsf.vportal.net/?fileid=2631

Panel Moderator, “Seeking Peace: Israeli Peace Activists Panel” (with Israeli representatives of Peace Now, New Profile, Bereaved Families Forum), San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 30, 2001, Wheeler Hall, University of California, Berkeley

Panel Moderator, “Mideast Peace Prospects After Camp David II: Amira Hass (Ha’aretz Newspaper) and Hamdi Faraj (Al Quds Newspaper),” San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 31, 2000.

ACADEMIC HONORS

Nominated by the Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, for the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Charles Bernheimer Prize for best dissertation published in 2003.

Nominated for the ACLA’s Horst Frend Prize for best graduate student paper presented at the annual conference, Winter 2002-3.

Comparative Literature Departmental Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 1997.

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor, 1998-99.  Awarded by the Academic Senate at the University of California, Berkeley.

RECENT COURSE OFFERINGS

Undergraduate World Literature Survey II (English 236): “Literary Encounters with the Other,” University of South Alabama, Fall 2004

Graduate Postcolonial Literature Seminar (English 592): “Disrupting Modernity: Postcolonial Literature, Film and Theory,” University of South Alabama, Fall 2003

English Composition II (English 102): University of South Alabama, Spring 2004

Undergraduate World Literature Survey II (English 236): “The Center Cannot Hold,” University of South Alabama, Fall 2003

American Cultures/Comparative Literature 60AC: Introduction to Film and Literary Texts of American Ethnic and Racial Minority Groups. Course theme: “Displacements of Identity in African-American, Asian-American, Chicano/a, and Jewish-American film and literature of the 20th Century.” UC Berkeley, Fall 2001; Fall 1999

Comparative Literature 41E: Forms of Cinema: Historical Survey of Western and Non-Western Film from the 19th Century to the Present.  “Remembering and Repeating in Cinema: Tracking the Rise and Fall of The People,” University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2001

RESEARCH LANGUAGES

French (speak, read, write)

Hebrew (speak, read, write)

Spanish (read, speak minimally)

Aramaic (read)

DEPARTMENTAL SERVICE

Graduate Curriculum Committee, University of South Alabama, 2004-5.  Participated in drafting and implementing graduate program assessment rubrics and revising graduate education objectives.

Editor, Biannual Departmental Newsletter, 2004-5.  Responsibilities include gathering pertinent information on faculty and graduate students, Departmental events, and scholarship opportunities for inclusion in a recruitment, retention and fund-raising newsletter.

Undergraduate Curriculum Committee,  University of South Alabama, 2003-4.  Participated in preparing and implementing assessment mechanisms for undergraduate majors and for the Department’s literature survey classes required of all undergraduates.

Departmental Webmaster, University of South Alabama, 2003-5.  Co-responsibility for maintaining and updating Departmental Web site.

Technology Committee, University of South Alabama, 2003-5.  Helped write successful grants for technology improvements in the Department.

Faculty Sponsor, English Graduate Student Organization, 2003-5.  Helped graduate students to organize an active graduate student advocacy and professional development organization.

Graduate Student Representative, Francophone Academic Search Committee, Universty of California, Berkeley, 1995-6.

Departmental Research Assistant: researched, organized and equiped the first Comparative Literature Multimedia Facility, UC Berkeley, 1998-9

FILM AND ELECTRONIC MEDIA EXPERIENCE

Videographer, Families USA (non-profit healthcare advocacy organization), nationwide public relations tour for affordable universal health care, Summer 1991.

Founder and Editor, Jewish Peace News, an on-line news clipping and commentary service with seven editors and more than 4200 subscribers, 2000-present.

Director and Producer, And I Still Remain Here, (b/w film, 16mm, 80 minutes) documenting the situation of Central American refugees in the United States.  Partially funded by a grant from Art Matters, Inc.; selected for exhibition, "Conflicts in the Global Village," the Alternative Museum, NYC, Spring 1988. Screened at Artist's Space, NYC, Summer 1989.

Trained in the use of WebCT, an on-line program for developing interactive course web sites.

Assistant Foreign Guest Coordinator, Jerusalem International Film Festival, Summer 1994, 1995, 1996.

Administrative Intern, "Sexism, Colonialism, Misrepresentation" film conference, curated by Yvonne Rainer & Bérénice Reynaud, Spring 1988.

ORGANIZATIONAL EXPERIENCE

Board Member, Berkeley Hillel Board of Directors, 1997-2002.  Served on the Executive Committee for two terms,1998-99 and 2001-02, and chaired the Personnel Committee, 2001-02.  Wrote and implemented executive director review and evaluation procedures.

Representative, Jewish Community Relations Council, 1999-2002.  Responsible for representing Berkeley Hillel in the Bay Area’s major Jewish coalition body, organized by the Jewish Federation.

Co-Founder, A Jewish Voice for Peace, a grassroots peace organization,  San Francisco Bay Area, 1996-present.  Led the organization, 1997-2000.  Jewish Voice for Peace now has four full-time staff members and an annual budget of over $200,000.

TRAVEL AND RESEARCH:

Delegation member, Mazon: The Jewish Fund for Hunger delegation to Haiti, January 2003. Conducted site visits at micro-economic projects initiated by the Lambi Fund of Haiti in Port au Prince and Gonaïves. Interviewed Haitian novelist and poet Lyonel Trouillot.

Visiting scholar, Tel Aviv University, Porter Institue of Poetics and Semiotics, Ziva Ben-Porat and Hanan Hever advisors, Fall 1994-Summer 1995.  Attended intensive Hebrew language courses and conducted archival research in the Israeli national literary archives on the popular reception of Aharon Appelfeld’s fiction

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATION MEMBERSHIPS

Modern Language Association (since 1995)

American Comparative Literature Association

Association of Jewish Studies

Northeast Modern Language Association

REFERENCES

Professor Sue Walker, Chair, Department of English, University of South Alabama: (251) 460-6146; email: swalker@jaguar1.usouthal.edu

Professor Richard Zeikowitz, Department of English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice: (718) 975-7601 (home); email: rezeik@optonline.net

Professor Chana Kronfeld, Department of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley: (510) 642-6177 (office); (510) 845-8022 (home); email: kronfeld@socrates.berkeley.edu

Professor Michael Lucey, Department of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley: (510) 642-0277 (office); (415) 255-1566 (home); email: mlucey@socrates.berkeley.edu