Dr. Sheila E. Jelen

Professional Background

Sheila Jelen is a professor of religion, literature, visual culture, and the history of Judaism at the University of Chicago. She also serves as an associate editor for Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History. Her recent publications include Olga Lengyel, Auschwitz Survivor: Interdisciplinary Explorations; Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance; Israeli Salvage Poetics; and Salvage Poetics: Post Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies. Her edited volumes include Building a City: Writings on Agnon’s Buczacz in Memory of Alan Mintz and Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades. Ms. Jelen is currently editing a forthcoming volume of folk tales and photographs by folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and photographer Menachem Kipnis, who died in the Warsaw ghetto. 

Fellowship Research

While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Kurt and Thea Sonnenmark Memorial Fellow, Sheila Jelen will conduct research on the identification of individuals in historical photographs. Her work explores the narrative and testimonial nature of these identifications and examines their role in historical storytelling and 21st-century Holocaust memory. The Museum’s archival photo collection, along with associated histories and administrative files, will be essential resources for her research.

Residency Period: June 1, 2026–July 31, 2026