Agnieszka Legutko

Senior Lecturer in Yiddish
Director of the Yiddish Language Program in the Department of Germanic Languages
212-851-0157
abl2109@columbia.edu

Agi Legutko specializes in modern Yiddish literature, language, and culture, women and gender studies, spirit possession in Judaism, as well as in American and European modern Jewish literature, theater, and film. Her research interests also include trauma, memory, performance, and the body represented in modern Jewish culture. She is interested in developing new Yiddish pedagogy in the post-method era, as well as in employing digital humanities in teaching Yiddish language and literature.

Her digital humanities projects include: Mapping Yiddish New York, an online platform featuring student-generated entries on the cultural Yiddish history of the city, and The Grosbard Project, a unique audio archive of Hertz Grosbard’s “word concerts” of Yiddish literature. She is currently completing the Dybbuk Archives project, documenting production history of S. An-sky’s Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds (1914), one of the most famous Yiddish plays, with the support of the 2022 Provost’s Innovative Course Design Grant for “Building an Online Archive: A Meaningful Engagement with the Past in a Literature Course.”

She has recently completed her first monograph exploring the trope of dybbuk possession and trauma in transnational modern Jewish cultures. She is the author of Krakow’s Kazimierz: Town of Partings and Returns, a historical guidebook to the Jewish Quarter of Krakow (in English and Polish, 2004, 2009), and her publications have appeared in several journals and essay collections on Yiddish literature and culture.

She received her Ph.D. with distinction in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University, and her M.A. in English Language and Literature, specializing in Language Pedagogy and Translation Studies from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Before joining Columbia University, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Maryland. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, both at Columbia University. She is the recipient of the 2024 Lenfest Award for Distinguished Faculty and the 2024 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Agi teaches courses in Yiddish language on elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels, as well as in Yiddish literature and culture, such as “Magic and Monsters in Yiddish Literature”, “Gender and Sexuality in Yiddish Literature”, “Life Writing in Yiddish Literature: Autobiography, Memoir, or Fiction?”, “Memory and Trauma in Yiddish Literature”, and “New Yiddish Literature”.

Selected publications:
“Bashevis Reconsidered: Rereading Singer through Gender and Queer Lenses”, Studies in American Jewish Literature, (vol. 44, no. 2 (2025): 213-225.

“A Portrait of An Empathetic Artist as a Young Man: Introduction to the Early Works of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Isaac Bashevis Singer, In the World of Chaos: Selected Early Works edited by Daniel Kennedy, Jan Schwarz, and Rose Waldman (Academic Studies Press, 2026).

“The Dybbuk Century in Poland: Dybbuks, and the Contemporary Discourse on the Polish/Jewish Past," The Dybbuk Century: The Jewish Play that Possessed the World, ed. Debra Caplan and Rachel Moss (University of Michigan Press, 2023): 183-207.

“Hertz Grosbard’s Jewspeak: The Lost Art of Word Concerts,” in There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things: Essays in Honor of David Roskies, Special Issue, In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (June 2020).

“Possessed by the Traumatic Past: Postmemory and S. An-sky’s The Dybbuk in Kantor’s The Dead Class,” The Theater of Tadeusz Kantor, ed. Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi, (Northwestern University Press, 2020).

“Obsessed with the Possessed: The Dybbuk Motif in Jewish Literature,” The Dybbuk, Between Two Worlds: An Anthology, ed. Mieczyslaw Abramowicz and Jan Ciechowicz, (in Polish & English, Gdansk University Press, 2017).

“‘The Circus Lady:’ Gender Poetry of Celia Dropkin,” Silent Souls? Women in Yiddish Culture, ed. Joanna Lisek, (in Polish, Wroclaw University Press, 2010).

“Feminist Dybbuks: Spirit Possession Motif in Post-Second Wave Jewish Women’s Fiction,” Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal (Spring 2010)

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