Sharon Zelnick is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. She is a co-organizer of the UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies. She works in the fields of Holocaust studies, Jewish American literature, cultural memory studies, migration literature, and visual culture. Sharon’s dissertation focuses on the question of what memory dynamics emerge when Israelis migrate to the country that tried to eradicate the Jewish people? She engages with Israeli migrant literature and media that memorializes the Holocaust in Germany. She examines how these aesthetic projects challenge and change Germany’s, and broader European and Israeli, memory cultures.

Education

  • B.A., Tel Aviv University, 2016
  • M.A., Leiden University, 2018

Research

  • (Post)memory in literary and artistic works across Palestinian-Israeli-German contexts
  • Intergenerational memory and migration
  • Photography-embedded migrant literature
  • Jewish American Literature

Publications

Articles

Field of Interest

Contemporary Literature, Jewish American Literature, Cultural Memory, Media Studies, Migration and Exile, Holocaust Studies, Trauma

Languages

English, Hebrew, German

Teaching

  • Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz: Institute for Film, Theater, Media and Cultural Studies
      • Winter 2022-2023, “Jewish Multimedia Migrant Narratives,” Seminar Instructor
  • University of California, Los Angeles
      • Spring 2022, “Reading and Visualizing Postmemories of the Holocaust and the Nakba,” Seminar Instructor
      • Fall 2021 and Winter 2022, “Political Violence in the Modern World,” Teaching Associate
      • Spring 2021, “Great Books from the World at Large,” Teaching Assistant
      • Fall 2020 & Winter 2021, “Literature from The Age of Enlightenment to the 20th Century,” Teaching Assistant
      • Fall 2019, “Modern Hebrew Literature Made into Films,” Reader
  • Leiden University
      • Fall 2017, “Introduction to Gender Studies,” Reader

Conference Papers

  • “Anthologies Against the Grain” at the Entangled Otherings: Muslim and Jewish Relations after October 7th Conference at Cambridge University, July 2024
  • “Israeli Migrants Intergenerational Dialogues with German-Jewish Thinkers” at the American Comparative Literature Associations Annual Conference, March 2024
  • “Recuperation and Return in the Work of Philip Roth and Yael Bartana” at the Memory Studies Association Annual Meeting, The University of Warwick, July 2023
  • “The Photo/Text as a Medium of Jewish-American Memory” at the Ben Lerner Paris Conference, the University of Chicago Center in Paris, June 2023
  • “Reading Mizrahi Israeli Multilingual Poetics in Germany as Protest” at the World Congress of Jewish Studies Annual Conference, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, August 2022
  • “Migratory Reimaginations in Germany: Benyamin Reich’s Postmemorial Holocaust Photographs.” at the Mnemonics Summer School, Aarhus University, August 2021.
  • “Holocaust Postmemories and Occupation Hauntings in Dani Gal’s White City” at the Geaneologies of Memory Annual Conference, European Network for Remembrance and Solidarity, November 2020.
  • “Intersectional Resistance in Shirin Neshat’s I Will Greet the Sun Again” at the Memory and Political Responsibility Conference, UCLA, February 2020.
  • “Shifting Narratives in Contemporary Photo-Embedded Migrant Fiction” at the International Conference on Narrative, McGill University, April 2018.
  • “Visualizing Histories of Injustice: Photography in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants” at the ACLA Annual Meeting, UCLA, March 2018.
  • “Photography as Political Resistance: Protest and Play in Dow Wasiksiri and Manit Sriwanichpoom” at the Platform for Postcolonial Readings Annual Meeting, University of Amsterdam, January 2018.“The Ethics of Visual Representation: Women Refugees in Ad van Denderen’s Go No Go” at NOG (Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies) Graduate Student Conference, Utrecht University, May 2017.