I feel very grateful for all the support and kindness that people have shown me with this award and throughout the writing process!

My dissertation is about the work of several Yiddish poets in New York during the Second World War and the Holocaust. They were writing about the Holocaust as piecemeal information was filtering in from Europe. For a couple of reasons, the study of Holocaust literature has systematically excluded these works. I’m making an argument for their inclusion in the genre of Holocaust literature, and more broadly that we need a new set of terms to account for the experience of writers like these. All of these poets were immigrants from Europe; they had family, friends, homes there, and they were in a position of physical safety, watching their homes being destroyed. They were experiencing the event even though they were not necessarily in immediate danger. The language we have available for describing and accounting for such experience of the Holocaust is somewhat insufficient.

In particular, I try to disentangle two terms: survivor and witness. We’re familiar with the term survivor, which is usually limited to people who survived the concentration camps. The other term is witness, which has been used somewhat interchangeably with survivor over the past sixty years or so. I argue that, separately, these terms allow us to think about two different kinds of experiences. There is some other thing that is happening with this community because they are conceptually, existentially implicated: they understand the Holocaust as a thing that is happening to the Jewish people as whole in addition to the specific communities of Europe. In that sense, they are more than bystanders but not necessarily survivors. I argue that disentangling witness from survivor can help us understand this community’s experiences. Searching for new terms is an ongoing project for me that began with my dissertation.

Q: Can you give us a glimpse of your personal background before you came to Bloomington?

I spent most of my life and did my undergraduate studies in Australia. I was born in the US and we moved to Australia when I was seven. I took Yiddish classes as an undergrad because my mother had studied Yiddish in college, and I was interested in it. Halfway through my undergrad degree, that program ended, so I came to the US to do a summer program. I encountered some scholars working on Holocaust memory, and it got me interested in what happens to memory and memoir during the process of translation.

I joined IU’s Comparative Literature department in 2014. After finishing the Master’s, I applied to be a dual major PhD student with the Religious Studies program. I came to IU with a mind to work on memoir, but I quickly realized that there’s not much left to be said about Holocaust memoir. So, I started working with poetry.

Q: What has been your favorite thing about living in Bloomington?

Bloomington was a big change for me. It is by far the smallest place I’ve ever lived. I like the pace of life in Bloomington; it provides a nice contrast to the pace of life of graduate school. There’s a lot of wonderful community building that is happening in this town that is not necessarily connected to IU.

Q: Can you walk us through your dissertation writing process?

One of the things that I want to flag from my own process is that (I hope) most other people won’t be in the same situation I was, since my whole dissertation was done during the pandemic. My first semester of writing properly was Spring 2020, and my last semester of doing revisions was Fall 2021. Before the pandemic I had done no work at home and had tried to separate those spaces. One of the things that I learned about myself was that I really struggled to try to write in the afternoon. I did almost all my writing in the morning, and then I would save the afternoon for other kinds of work. The thing that got me through that time was writing groups. I was running them for IU’s Writing Tutorial Services at the time, but I also started three of my own so I had one every day of the work week. I was writing with others for accountability; it was really about working with others in the same space that helped me stay on task, and having others to complain to when we were stressed.

My writing process varied from chapter to chapter depending on how confident I was in my argument before I started writing. For a couple of chapters I had done the research already, so I just started writing. For some chapters, it was a combination of research and writing. As I was doing my research, I would do prose notes; I’d write notes in the form of full paragraphs as if they were going to be cut and pasted into the dissertation, trying to do research and writing at once and think alongside the books I was reading.

I, for better or worse, started with the third chapter of my dissertation because it was the chapter I had the clearest idea about what I wanted to say, and also the one that I thought was going to be the most difficult at the time. I can’t say I recommend it because after writing the first two chapters, my argument had changed so significantly that the last major writing task I did for the dissertation before the introduction and conclusion was rewriting the third chapter. That said, I think the somewhat cyclical process actually helped me to better understand my own arguments.

Q: What advice would you give to graduate students at different stages of their dissertation?

The first thing that I would say, especially for people starting out, is to take the time to pause and reflect on what works for you. There’s a lot of literature out there about writing dissertations. A lot of it makes big claims about what is the best practice. Ultimately, if you read carefully in those books, they all come down to “but this might not work for you and whatever works for you is best.” So, the first step is figuring out what time of day works best for you, where you want to be writing, and how you write the best. The most famous book about writing your dissertation is Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. The gist of the book is just try to do a little bit every day. Make it a consistent and repeated part of your life. The reflective work is going to help with consistency.

Second, talk to your committee about feedback and talk about it early on. Talk to each of them about how their particular perspective can best help you. Do they want to see full chapters only or are they happy to see it piece by piece? Who does it go to first? Everyone on my committee already knew who was getting the chapters in what order. That way we are not getting conflicting advice. Also, your dissertation is your project, so it is okay to contend with feedback and not adopt it automatically as long as you can justify why. It is a process, it is a conversation, and your committee members are not writing the dissertation for you. Be open to feedback and be honest with them, but sometimes compromise can be made and had in those moments.

Finally, my most important piece of advice is that self-care is a crucial part of the writing process. If you’re not having a good time, you are not going to be doing your best work, and you may start resenting the process of writing itself. It’s important to find the time to do the things that energize you as a person separate from the dissertation because you are more important than your work.