Board Member

Gabriella Safran

Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University

Gabriella Safran, the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University, teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is the author and editor of prize-winning books on how Russian novels describe Jewish assimilation and on the relation between Jewish literature and anthropology; her biography of a pioneering Russian-Jewish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky, came out with Harvard University Press in 2010. Safran is now finishing a book on the intellectual history of Russian folkloristics, looking at discourse about listening, transcription, and verbal imitation across class lines in the mid 19th century, and beginning another book about the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.