I am a DPhil student in Political Theory at Brasenose College and the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. I study Yiddish political thought and its history.
I prioritise archival research and close reading of primary sources in Yiddish, ranging from scholarly treatises and monographs, to popular pamphlets, poetry, and fiction. I also draw from analytical and continental political philosophy, critical theory, sociolinguistics, and intellectual history. In my DPhil thesis, Dispatches from Diaspora: Recovering the History of Yiddish Political Thought, I intend to explicate three central ideas in Yiddish political thought — Yiddishism, Autonomism, and Doikayt — and to identify the relations between Yiddish political thought and parallel traditions that developed in conversation with it.
For my DPhil I have received generous funding from the Department of Politics and International Relations to continue the work I began as an MPhil student. I obtained my MPhil in Political Theory at the University of Oxford in 2024 with the support of the Truman Foundation. In my MPhil thesis, I developed and used a function-based approach to analysing utopian texts to provide the first extended study of Kalman Zingman’s Yiddish-language utopian novel In Der Tsukunft-Shtot Edenia (1918) and to explicate some central ideas in Yiddish political thought. Before coming to Oxford, I completed a B.A. at Colorado College, where I focused on jurisprudence and the history of political thought. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on dignity-based arguments for regulating hate speech.
Research Interests
- Yiddish political thought and its history
- Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish political thought and related traditions (e.g., Socialism, Russian Marxism, Austromarxism, German Romanticism, Zionism)
- Jewish diasporism and anti-Zionism
- Utopia and utopianism
Relevant Posts
Convener, Oxford Utopia Reading Group — Weekly interdisciplinary reading group for postgraduate students and faculty interested in utopian literature and political thought.
Co-Convener, Oxford Work in Progress in Political Theory Seminar (OWIPT) — Fortnightly seminar for graduate students from any department working on political theory broadly construed.
Coordinating Committee Member, Farbindungen Yiddish Studies Conference— Work with an international team to solicit abstracts, select papers, plan panels, and organise workshops for an annual Yiddish studies conference for graduate students and early career scholars.
