Professional Background
Ofer Dynes is the Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. His research examines Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish literature alongside Eastern European Jewish cultural history within the broader Slavic context from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the intersection of literary theory and political thought. His scholarship has appeared Polin, EAJS, Prooftexts, Jewish Social Studies, Naharaim, and AJS Review, among other journals. His monograph, The Fiction of the State: The Polish Partitions and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature, was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. His research has been supported by the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, the Thesaurus Poloniae Fellowship in Kraków, the Center for Urban History in Lviv, YIVO, The Center for Jewish History in New York, and the “Dimensions of Europe” Center at the University of Graz.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow, Ofer Dynes will conduct research on Jewish fiction authored under Nazi rule across Europe and examine how this body of literature was categorized and interpreted in the immediate postwar period. He will draw on the Museum’s rich holdings, including the Polish underground periodicals collection, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee archive, and France territorial collections, among other resources.
Residency Period: January 1, 2027 - April 30, 2027