Brett Ashley Kaplan Directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies at the University of Illinois where she is a professor of Comparative and World Literature. She was the Nannerl O. Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at Duke and UNC in 2023-2024. She publishes in Haaretz, The Conversation, Salon.com Asitoughttobemagazine, AJS Perspectives, Contemporary Literature, Edge Effects, and The Jewish Review of Books. She has been interviewed on NPR, the AJS Podcast, and The 21st, and is the author of Unwanted Beauty, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth, and Rare Stuff (a novel). Her edited collection, Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches was published by Bloomsbury in May 2023, and she is at work on a co-edited collection (with Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell and Sara Feldman) entitled Blewish And Beautiful: Contemporary Black-Jewish Voices. She has recently finished a second novel, Epiphany’s Lament, about a Nazi looted painting which may (or may not) have been hidden in a Vietnamese Refugee Center in provincial England. She is currently beginning work on Seneca (a novel). 

 

Brett was born and raised in New York City, but spent time in California at UC Santa Cruz and then received her Ph.D. from Berkeley. In between, she studied at Sussex, and lived in London and New York for several years, where she worked in publishing. She dreams of returning to New York.