Gabriella Safran received her BA with honors in Soviet and East European Studies from Yale University and her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University in 1998. 

Safran has written on Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures.  Her most recent book, Wandering Soul:  The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard, 2010), is a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, a revolutionary, and a wartime relief worker. 

Safran teaches and writes on Russian literature, Yiddish literature, folklore, and folkloristics.  She is now working on two projects:  a monograph investigating nineteenth-century short Russian and Yiddish fiction in the context of the history of listening, and an article looking at the interaction of the Russian and Jewish rhetorical traditions among early-twentieth-century revolutionaries.  

As the chair of the DLCL, Safran is increasingly interested in the reorganization of humanities departments and the implications of that for teaching, learning, and scholarship.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download