Agnieszka Legutko

Lecturer in Yiddish 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 exploring the possibilities offered by digital humanities in Yiddish language instruction and is an advocate of integrating technology in the classroom.

She is currently focusing on creating an online database of Yiddish teaching materials, Yiddish digital platforms, such as Mapping Yiddish New York and The Grosbard Project, and is completing a manuscript exploring the trope of dybbuk possession in 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 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, Women, Gender and Sexuality in Yiddish Literature, Yiddish New York: Literature, Culture, and Space, and Life Writing in Yiddish Literature: Autobiography, Memoir, or Fiction?  

Selected publications:

–“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).

–“Yiddish in the 21st Century: New Media to the Rescue of Endangered Languages,” Handbook of Foreign Language Education in the Digital Age, ed. Lisa Winstead and Penny Wang (Hershey, Pennsylvania: IGI Global, 2016)

–“Dybbuk as a Key to Identity,” Cwiszn (in Polish, Summer-Fall 2014)  

–“‘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)