Louis Kaplan (Co-Organizer)
Louis Kaplan is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media in the Graduate Department of the History of Art at the University of Toronto and an associate faculty member in the collaborative Ph.D. program in Jewish Studies. He also coordinates the Visual Culture and Communication program at the University of Toronto at Mississauga where he is a member of the Centre for Visual and Media Culture. Kaplan has also taught at Tufts University and Southern Illinois University and he has held international post-doctoral fellowships in Jerusalem and Berlin . Professor Kaplan has published widely in the fields of art history, visual culture, photo studies, and in Jewish studies where he has published essays on such topics as Frederic Brenner, Clement Greenberg, Holocaust humor, Albert Einstein, and Walter Rathenau. He curated the contemporary art exhibition Distinguishing Jewish dealing with issues of Jewish identity held in Boston in 2000. He is the author of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings (Duke, 1995) and his new book American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (for which he received a SSHRC research grant) is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in November. Kaplan's essay on Wallace Berman and his film Aleph will be published in the volume Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Duke, 2006).

Webpage: http://www.fineart.utoronto.ca/faculty/kaplan.html

Andrea Most (Co-Organizer) is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Jewish Studies in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and an associate faculty member in the collaborative Ph.D. program in Jewish Studies. Professor Most recently published Making Americans:  Jews and the Broadway Musical (Harvard University Press, 2004) and is the 2004 recipient of the Polanyi Prize for Literature for her work on American Jewish culture. Other publications include a number of prize-winning articles on musicals in scholarly journals such as PMLA , Theater Journal , and American Jewish History and a forthcoming chapter on Jewish comic books and graphic novels in You Should See Yourself, an anthology on Jewish identity in postmodern American culture published by Rutgers University Press.  She has received Research Fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for work on her new project, Acting Jewish , a book-length study on Jewish self-representation in America . Prof. Most lectures widely to Jewish and academic audiences on topics in American Jewish literature and culture. She received her B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies and American Literature from Brandeis University.

Anna Shternshis (Co-Organizer)
Anna Shternshis is Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language and Literature at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She received her MA from the Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow , and her Ph.D. from Oxford University . She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at University of Pennsylvania . Shternshis is a specialist in Russian Jewish history and culture, oral history, and Yiddish popular culture and music. Her book Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1923 – 1939 is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. Her articles have appeared in East European Jewish Affairs, Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union, Journal of Russian Academy of Science and others. Her recent study of Yiddish children's songs in the Soviet Union is included in the anthology The Art of Being Jewish in the Modern World forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press . Currently, together with Zvi Gitelman, she is working on a two volume monograph on Jewish Daily Life in Stalinist Russia . In 2003, Shternshis organized an international conference and mini-festival Soviet and Kosher: 100 years of Russian Jewish Culture. For this event, she produced a specially commissioned concert “Klezmer behind the Iron Curtain.”