Chana Kronfeld

Job title: 
Bernie Williams Professor Emerita of Modern Hebrew and Comparative Literature
Bio/CV: 

Professor Kronfeld taught Hebrew, Yiddish, and Comparative Literature in MELC from the mid-1980s until her retirement in 2022.

Professor Kronfeld is the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics which won the MLA Scaglione Prize in 1996 for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies. Her co-translation (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open won the PEN Translation Prize. She is the recipient (with Chana Bloch) of the top 2005-6 National Endowment for the Arts award for the translation and annotated edition of Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (N.Y. W.W. Norton, 2009). She’s the author, most recently, of The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Stanford, 2016). Her contributions (with Chana Bloch) to Robert Alter’s The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) include an expanded edition of Open Closed Open. Benjamin Harshav’s Hebrew-Yiddish volume, Kol Ha-Shirim, is her most recent collaborative project (with Udi Hrushovski; Carmel, 2017).

Research interests: 

Modernism in Hebrew, Yiddish and English poetry, intertextuality, translation studies, theory of metaphor, literary historiography, stylistics and ideology, gender studies, political poetry, marginality and minor literatures, literature & linguistics, negotiating theory and close reading.

Role: