CURRICULUM VITAE
Phyllis Lassner
2111 Orrington Ave.
Evanston, Illinois 60201
E-mail: [email protected]
Home: 847-733-7712
Office: 847-491-7414
Education
Ph.D. Wayne State University, English Literature
Teaching Appointments
Professor, The Crown Center for Jewish Studies, The Gender Studies Program, WCAS Writing
Program, Northwestern University 1993Visiting Professor: Department of Linguistics and Foreign Literatures, Women's Studies
Program, Ben-Gurion University, Israel, Winter, 1992.
Administrative Appointment
Book Series Editor, Northwestern University Press: “Cultural Expressions of World War II:
Preludes, Responses, Memory.”
PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust: Displaced Witnesses. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2004.
British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of their Own. London: Macmillan, N.Y.:
St. Martin's, 1998.
Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Novels. London: Macmillan, 1990.
The Short Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991.
Co-Edited Volumes
Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Representing
Jews, Jewishness, and Modern Culture. Newark, N.J.: U Delaware P, 2008.
1
Rumer Godden: International and Intermodern Storyteller. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010.
Reprint Projects and Introductions
A Tempered Wind: The Kindertransport Autobiography of Karen Gerson. NUP, 2010.
A Lesser Child: Karen Gershon’s German-Jewish Childhood. NUP, forthcoming 2011.
Soundless Roar: Poems, Stories, and Drawings of Holocaust Memory. By Ava Kadishson
Schieber. Evanston: NUP, 2003.
The Dangerous Age (1910) by Karin Michaelis. Evanston: Northwestern U P, 1991.
The Mortal Storm (1937) by Phyllis Bottome. Evanston: NUPress, 1998.
Old Wine (1924) by Phyllis Bottome. Evanston: NUP, 1998.
ARTICLES in Refereed Journals and Scholarly Collections
"The Past is a Burning Pattern: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September," Eire-Ireland: Studies in
Irish Culture 21 (Spring 1986):40-54.
"Reimagining the Arts of War: Language and History in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of
The Day and Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness," Perspectives on Literature
14, UP Kentucky, 1988.
"Women's Midlife and the Crisis of Writing: Karin Michaelis's The Dangerous Age and Rose
Macaulay's Dangerous Ages." Atlantis (Spring 1989):21-31.
"The Quiet Revolution on the Home Front: World War II and the English Domestic Novel."
Troops versus Tropes: War and Literature. Ed. Evelyn J. Hinz. Winnipeg: Mosaic 23
(Summer 1990):87-101.
“Fiction as Historical Critique: The Retrospective World War II Novels of Maureen Duffy and
Beryl Bainbridge." Phoebe: A Feminist Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (Fall
1991):12-26.
"`A Cry For Life: The World War II Novels of Storm Jameson and Stevie Smith." Visions of
War: World War II in Popular Literature and Culture. Ed. M.Paul Holsinger and Mary
Anne Schofield. Bowling Green:The Popular Press, 1992:181-191.
"Revisioning Literary Motherhood: Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart and Elizabeth
Jane Howard's Odd Girl Out." The Anna Book: Searching for Anna in Literary History.
Ed. Mickey Pearlman. NY: Greenwood Press, 1992:71-81.
2
"`Between the Gaps': Sex, Class and Anarchy in the British Comic Novel of World War II."
Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy. Ed. Gail Finney. NY: Gordon and Breach,
1994: 205-220.
"`A New World Indeed!': Feminist Critique and Power Relations in British Anti-Utopian
Literature of the 1930s." Extrapolation (Fall 1995): 259-272.
"`The Milk of Mother's Kindness Has Ceased to Flow'": Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, and the
Representation of the Jew." Beyond Race and Culture: The Representation of the Jew in
English and American Literature. Ed. Bryan Cheyette. Stanford U Press, 1996.
"Resisting Romance: Popular Fiction of the Second World War. Women: A Cultural Review 8
(Spring 1997).
"`Objects to Possess or Discard': The Representation of Jews and Women by British
Women Novelists of the 1920s." Borderlines: Genders and Identities in Peace and
War: 1880-1930. Ed. Billie Melman. London: Routledge, 1998.
“Camp Follower of Catastrophe Martha Gellhorn’s World War II Challenge to the
Modernist War.” Modern Fiction Studies (Fall 1998):792-812.
“Karin Michaelis.” Twentieth Century Danish Literature. Ed.Marianne Stecher-Hansen.
Columbia, S. Carolina: Bruccoli Clark and Layman, l999.
“Witness to Their Vanishing: Elaine Feinstein’s Fictions of Jewish Continuity.” British Women
Writing Fiction. Ed. Abby Werlock. U Alabama P, 2000: 107-125.
“The Timeless Elsewhere of the Second World War: Rosmond Lehmann’s The Ballad
and the Source and Kate O’Brien’s The Last of Summer.” Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of
Survival. Ed. Rod Mengham and N.H. Reeve. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001:70-90.
“A Bridge Too Close: Racial Ideologies and Narrative Wars to End Fascism and
Imperialism.” Journal of Narrative Theory (Fall 2001).
“The Game is Up: Women’s Comic Novels of the End of Empire.” Comedy,
Fantasy, And Colonialism. Ed. Graeme Harper. London: Continuum, 2002.
“Storm Jameson.” Modern British Women Writers. Ed. Vicki Janik and Del Janik. Westport:
Greenwood Press, 2002: 166-173.
“Aimee and Jaguar: A Holocaust Love Story.” Holocaust Literature. Ed. Lilian Kremer.
NY: Routledge, 2003.
“Anne Karpf’s The War After: The Holocaust’s Second Generation.” Holocaust Literature.
Ed. Lilian Kremer. NY: Routledge, 2003.
3
4
“On the Point of a Journey: Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bottome, and the Novel of Women’s
Political Psychology.” And in Our Time: Vision, Revision, and British Writing of the
1930s. Ed. Antony Shuttleworth. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2003. 115-131.
“Elaine Feinstein’s Poetic Transformations of Jewish Dislocation.” Jewish Women’s
Writing of the 1990s and Beyond in Great Britain and the United States. Ulrike Behlau
and Bernhard Reitz, Eds. Trier,, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004.
“World War II Literature.” Literature and Politics. Ed. M. Keith Booker. Westport:
Greenwood, 2005.
“Double Trouble: George Orwell, Martha Gellhorn and the Global War to End Global
Imperialism.” Globalization and Its Discontents. Ed. Stan Smith. Oxford: D.S. Brewer,
2006.
“Rebecca West’s Shadowy Other.” Rebecca West Today. Ed. Bernard Schweizer. Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2006. 43-63.
“Negotiating the Distance: Collaborative Learning and Teaching Night.” Approaches to
Teaching Wiesel’s Night. Ed. Alan Rosen. N.Y.: Modern Language Assoc., 2007.
“’Words That Can’t Be Spoken’: Lesbian Love in Berlin 1943.” War-Torn Tales: Literature,
Film and Gender in the Aftermath of World War II. Ed. Danielle Hipkins and Gill
Plain. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. 257-276.
“The View From a Crevice: Isaiah Spiegel’s ‘Bread’.” The Call of Memory: Learning About
The Holocaust Through Narrative. Ed. Karen Shawn and Keren Goldfrad. Teaneck,
N.J.: Ben Yehuda Press, 2008. 213-223.
With Paula Derdiger. “Domestic Gothic, the Global Primitive, and Gender Relations in Elizabeth
Bowen’s The Last September and The House in Paris. Irish Modernism and the Global
Primitive. Ed. Maria McGarrity and Claire Culleton. N.Y.: Palgrave, 2009. 195-214.
“The Holocaust and Life Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War
II. Ed. Marina MacKay. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 179-193.
“The Mysterious New Empire: Agatha Christie’s Colonial Murders.” At Home and Abroad in the
Empire. Ed. R. Hackett, F.Hauser, and Gay Wachman. U Delaware P, 2009. 31-50.
“The Necessary Jew: Modernist Women Writers and Contemporary Women Critics. Varieties of
Antisemitism: History, Ideology, Discourse. Ed. Murray Baumgarten, Peter Kenez, and
Bruce Thompson. U Delaware P, 2009. 292-314.
“Under Suspicion: The Plotting of Britain in WWII Detective Spy Fiction.” Intermodernism.
Ed. Kristin Bluemel. Edinburgh UP, 2009. 113-130.
4
5
“Exiles from Jewish Memory: Anita Brookner’s Anglo-Jewish Aesthetic.” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 29.1 (Spring 2010). 47-62.
“Out of the Shadows: The Newly Collected Elizabeth Bowen.” Modernism/Modernity 17:3
(September 2010). 669-676.
“Race, Gender, and the Holocaust.” Modernism and Race. Ed. Len Platt. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011. 192-211.
Invited Lectures
"Bridging Two Worlds: Composition and Feminist Theories in the Classroom." The Naomi
Handelman Memorial Lecture, Tel Aviv University, May 1988.
"British Women Debating a Second World War," John Moores University, Liverpool, England,
Oct. 1996.
“British Women Writers, The End of World War II and The End of Empire.” Plenary Address,
Conference on “Dressing Up For War,” University of Barcelona, March, 1999.
“Storm Jameson’s End of the Empire,” University Nottingham-Trent, Dec.,1999.
“Translating Memories of the Holocaust.” Brunel University, London, Nov., 2000
“Imaginative Memories of the Holocaust.” Ben-Gurion U, December 2000
“Endangered Identities: The Holocaust and the End of Empire in Muriel Spark’s The
Mandelbaum Gate. The Simon Rifkind Lecture: City College of New York, Oct. 2001
“The Timeless Elsewhere of World War.” The Graduate Center, CUNY, Oct. 2001.
“The Presence of the Holocaust at the End of the British Mandate in Palestine.” Tel Aviv
University, Dec. 2001
“Race and Gender at the End of Empire: Martha Gellhorn’s Liana and Olivia Manning’s
School for Love. Columbia University, Jan., 2001.
“Muriel Spark, Pamela Frankau and the Question of Jewish Identity.” Plenary Address,
Conference on Jewish Women Writers and 20th Century British Culture, Brunel University,
July 2002.
“Elaine Feinstein’s Poetic Transformations of Jewish Dislocation and the Holocaust.”
Conference on Jewish Women’s Writing of the 1990s and Beyond. Johannes Gutenberg
University, Mainz, Germany, Feb., 2003.
Keynote Speaker, Conference on Women and the Holocaust, Roosevelt University, May
5
6
2003.
Children and the Holocaust, University of Antwerp, Jan. 2005.
“Britain’s Responses to Rescuing Hitler’s Victims,” University of Trondheim, Norway, 2007.
Kindertransport Memoirs. Tel Aviv University, Dec. 2008.
Keynote Address: “Testing the Limits of the Middlebrow: The Holocaust for the Masses,”
Internat’l Conference of the Middlebrow Network, University of Strathclyde, July 2009.
Invited lecture by the Chicago Consul General of Japan. “Commemorating Chiune Sugihara:
Holocaust Rescuer,” January, 2010.
Keynote Address: “Out of the Shadows: Elizabeth Bowen as ‘Onlooker’ of Her Time,”
Elizabeth Bowen – William Trevor Symposium, Mitchelstown, Ireland, April 2010.
“The Problems and Pleasures of Popular Holocaust Films,” Bar Ilan University, May 2010.
“"Collective Memory, Collective Amnesia: The End of Empire in the Middle East and the
Literary Imagination," British Studies Institute, University of Texas, Austin, Nov. 2010.
Refereed Conference Papers
"Rewriting the Myth of Female Sexual Destructiveness: Elizabeth Bowen's To The North.
Twentieth Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, 1985.
"Revising the Arts of War: British Women Writers of World War II." Twentieth Century
Literature Conference, 1987.
"The Quiet Revolution on the Home Front:English Domestic Fiction of World War II."
Twentieth Century Literature Conference, 1989.
"A Literary Response to the American Feminist Debate on Motherhood." Conference on Images
of Women, Tel Aviv University, 1989.
"The Future is Our Business: The World War II Novels of Stevie Smith and Storm Jameson."
Conference on Women's Heritage, Western Kentucky University, 1989.
"Women and Jews in World War II Novels of Olivia Manning and Phyllis Bottome." MLA,
1990.
"Re-Visioning Literary Motherhood: Elizabeth Jane Howard and Elizabeth Bowen." Twentieth
Century Literature Conference, 1991.
"The Retrospective World War II Novel." Conference on World War II: A Fifty Year
Perspective, Siena College, 1991.
"Women's Prophesies of a Second World War." Women and War Conference, U Texas, 1991.
"Contemporary Women Writers of World War II." Midwest MLA, 1991.
“Representation and Reaction: British Women Writers Imagining the Fate of the Jew.
Association of Jewish Studies, 1991.
"Redefining Pacifism: British Women Writers of World War II." Symposium on Women's
Studies, Ben-Gurion University, 1992.
6
7
"The Faultlines of History: Dystopic Novels of World War II by British Women Writers."
Midwest MLA, 1992.
"Rebecca West's Political Odyssey." MLA, 1992.
"Women's Silenced Prophesies of a Second World War." N A British Studies Association, 1993.
“British Anti-Utopias of the Thirties," Midwest MLA, 1993.
"The British World War II Comic Novel." Conference on World War II, Siena College, 1994.
"Sex, Class, and Anarchy in the World War II Fiction of Evelyn Waugh, Marghanita Laski, and
Beryl Bainbridge," Popular Culture Association, 1994.
"Gender, World War II and British Comic Culture," North Amer.British Studies Assoc., 1994.
“Revisionary Romance Novels of World War II." Popular Culture Assoc., 1995.
"The Coming of World War II and Elizabeth Bowen's Fated `Others," Conference on
Elizabeth Bowen, London, Ireland, Modernism," University of London, 1996.
"The Historical Politics of British Women's Writing,"M/MLA, Chicago, 1997.
"The Representation of Jews and Women in British Women Interwar Writers," Conference on
Interwar Texts and Contexts, Oxford University, March 1998.
“Sex and Race Wars: Narratives of the End of Modernism and the End of Empire.” The New
Modernisms Conference, Pennsylvania State University, October 1999.
“A Bridge Too Close: British Women Writing From the Victory of World War II to the End of
Empire.” Midwest Conference on British Studies, U Chicago, October 1999.
“The Last Gasp: The End of Romance at the End of Empire,” Conference on the Space
Between: 1914-1945, U Western Ontario, May 2000.
“Agatha Christie’s Mysterious New Empire,” At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British
Women in the Thirties, Conference at Graduate Center, CUNY, Sept., 2000
“Murder Most Modern: Agatha Christie’s Colonial Satire,” New Modernisms II Conference,
U Penn., Oct. 2000.
“The Novel of Women’s Political Psychology.” Conference on The Literature of the 1930s:
The Text in History. Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, England, Nov., 2000
“A Challenge to Death: A Manifesto for Peace in the Face of Fascism.” MLA 2000
“Captive Sexuality: Women’s Holocaust Narratives.” MLA 2000
“The Erotics of Terror: Women’s Holocaust Fiction.” The Space Between Conference.
University of Arkansas, May, 2001.
“The Holocaust and the End of Empire.” Conference on British Women Writers 1945-1960.
De Montfort University, Leicester, England, June 2001.
“Holocaust Memory and the Modernist Literary Imagination.” Modernist Studies Assoc., 2001.
“No Peace for the Victorious: British Women Writing War and Empire.” Modern Language
Assoc., Dec. 2001.
“The Challenge of the Colonizing Woman at the End of Empire.” British Commonwealth and
Postcolonial Studies Conference, Feb. 2002.
“Writing the Woman’s Settler Self in British Colonial Space.” Conference on “Mapping the
Self: Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/Biography, Ecole Normale Superieure,
Lyon, France, June, 2002.
“Reinstating the Colonial in Postcolonial Ethics.” Modern Language Association, Dec., 2002.
“Feminist Fear and Loathing of Antisemitism: The 1930s and Today,” Conference on
Rethinking Antisemitism: The Holocaust and the Contemporary World,” University of
California, Santa Cruz, May 2003.
“Rebecca West’s Shadowy Other: Representing the Jew and Jewishness,” Conference on
7
8
Rediscovering Rebecca West,” Long Island University, Sept., 2003.
“Writing World War II Today,” Modern Language Association, San Diego, Dec., 2003.
“A Nation Rapes Itself: A Narrative of Multiethnic Violence, Nationalist Yearning, and the
Woman.” The Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, April 2004.
“The Political Shadows of Rebecca West’s London.” 2004 Literary London Conference.
“Representations of the Jew in Postwar Britain.” Association for Jewish Studies, 2004.
“No Decolonization for the Jew: Contemporary British Holocaust Theater,” Southampton
University Conference on Race, Empire, and the Jew,” July 2005.
"Redefining the Fight Against Fascism: Rebecca West and Naomi Mitchison in the 1930s,”
Second International Rebecca West Conference, Sept. 2005.
”Rebecca West’s Quarrels with Communism,” MLA 2005.
“Imaginary Monsters: The Kindertransport.” Conference on Antisemitism and English
Culture, University of London, 2007.
“British Women’s Detective/Spy Fiction of the 1940s.” The Space Between Society, 2008.
“Imaginary Monsters: The Kindertransport.” Lessons and Legacies Conference, 2008.
“The Comic Operas of Anita Brookner’s Europa.” MLA 2008.
“Double Trouble: British Spy Fiction of the Cold War.” MSA 2009.
“What Difference the Holocaust Makes to the Space Between,” The Space Between, 2009.
“American Holocaust Film,” Association for Jewish Studies, 2009/
“Neither ‘Shrinking’ nor ‘Stuck’: British Spy Fiction and Film of World War II,” The Space
Between Society, 2010.
“Popular Holocaust Film,” The Lessons and Legacies Holocaust Conference, Nov. 2010.
“Britain Outward Bound,” The American Comparative Literature Assoc., April 2011.
“A Hollywood Star and the Middlebrow Poetics of Propaganda,” Space Between Society, 2011.
Northwestern University Service and Awards
Member Northwestern University Press Editorial Board
Promotion Committee for Continuing Lecturers
Faculty Associate, Women's Residential College
Co-Chair, Organization of Women Faculty
Advisory Board, Hillel at Northwestern
Associate Fellowship, Northwestern University Humanities Center, 1996
Hewlett Grants for New Courses based on Research, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2004, 2010.
URGLC Research Grant: 1997, 2003, 2009.
Panhellenic Assoc.and Interfraternity Council Award for Teaching Excellence, Nov.1999.
Professional Service
Co-Chair, Committee to Create Program in Women's Studies, Ben-Gurion University, 1991.
Taught Holocaust Literature for Holocaust Educational Foundation’s Summer Institute, 2001.
Co-President: The Society for The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945.
Member Executive Committee of the Division on Twentieth Century English Literature of the
Modern Language Association 2003-2007.
8
9
Peer Reviewer:
Northwestern U P, U Missouri P, Farleigh Dickenson Press, Notre Dame UP, U Texas Press,
Edinburgh UP, Cork UP, Ashgate Publishers, Routledge
Twentieth Century Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, LIT: Literature,
Interpretation, Theory, Virginia Woolf Annual. Orbis Litterarum, English History
Review.
Book Reviewer:
South Central Review, Women: A Cultural Review, Women’s History Review, Studies in the
Novel, Albion: Journal of British Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Patterns of Prejudice.
University of London Institute for Historical Research: Reviews in History, Review of English
Studies
Advisory Board, The Space Between :Literature and Culture 1914-1945.
Advisory Board, The Middlebrow: An Interdisciplinary Transatlantic Network, Strathclyde
University and Sheffield-Hallam University, 2008-.
Advisory Board, Middlebrow Monographs. 2010 - .
Advisory Board, Encyclopedia of Modern British Women Writers, Palgrave Press.
Editorial Board, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.
Editorial Board, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory.
Editorial Board: Twentieth Century Literature.
Guest Editor, The Journal of The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945, Special
Issue on the Middlebrow.
External Examiner, PhD Defense, University of Trondheim, Norway, 2007.
9
10
10