Event

A Talk with Author Harriet Murav

Explore the influence of Charlie Chaplin cinema on Yiddish literature, as written by David Bergelson (1884-1952). Join Harriet Murav, author of Music from a Speeding Train, as she shows how Bergelson used rhythm, sound, technology and gestures to create literary art that resembled the innovative films of Charlie Chaplin. A book signing will follow the event.

Harriet Murav received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Comparative Literature. She is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of many books including Russia's Legal Fictions, which was awarded the MLA 1999 Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner. She is currently working on a new project, "Marking Time," a book-length study of the Yiddish author David Bergelson in the context of early twentieth century theoretical and artistic inquiries about memory, time and consciousness, for which she received a fellowship at Stanford University's Humanities Center for 2012-2013.