Academic Bio
Professor Anna Elena Torres specializes in Jewish Studies, Gender Studies, and labor history, with particular attention to the subjects of statelessness, anti-statism, and borderlands literature.
Her forthcoming book is titled Any Minute Now The World Streams Over Its Border!: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (Yale University Press). This project examines the literary production, language politics, and religious thought of Jewish anarchist movements from 1870 to the present in Moscow, Tel Aviv, London, Buenos Aires, New York City, and elsewhere. The book’s archive includes early Proletarian (svetshop) poetry, talmudic commentary, political theology, and Modernist literature.
Professor Torres' second project is a study of Polish writer, philosopher, and art critic Debora Vogel (also written Dvoyre Fogel, 1900-1942). Deeply engaged with the artistic avant-garde, her aesthetic theory and practice anticipated postwar experimental representations of domestic temporality and women’s labor. Torres translated her poetry collection Manekinen (Mannequins, 1934) and is currently co-editing a special issue of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies devoted to Fogel's work.