Professor Anna Shternshis Named Guggenheim Fellow

Congratulations to University College faculty member Anna Shternshis, who was recently awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

The author of two books and dozens of articles on the Soviet Jewish experience, Shternshis is the Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish studies at the University of Toronto. Her award-winning work on Jewish history and popular culture is academically influential and impactful to a wide audience.

In 2018, she created the Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory project, which excavated and revived forgotten Yiddish music written during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. The Guggenheim Fellowship will support her work on a book on this topic.

“Most of the amateur authors who created these songs which documented experiences of starvation, violence, pandemics, discrimination, and death did not live to see the end of the war. Scholars who collected their songs in the 1940s also suffered,” says Shternshis. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is not only support for my work on this project, it is also an incredible recognition of the importance of people’s attempts to document history in their own words, an opportunity to provide their side of the story, and to ensure that we do not erase them from history.”

The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the world’s most distinguished honours for mid-career academics who have produced groundbreaking scholarly work and continue to show exceptional promise for future research.