Brett Ashley Kaplan

Brett Ashley Kaplan is a Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, affiliated with multiple departments including Comparative and World Literature, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Jewish Culture and Society, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, French and Italian, School of Art and Design, and Center for Global Studies. Her research spans Holocaust postmemory, Jewish-American literature, and race/ethnicity in contemporary art.

• Ph.D. in Rhetoric from University of California, Berkeley (2002)

Key research areas include:

• Holocaust art and literature
• Jewish American literary analysis
• Race/ethnicity in visual and performance art
• Environmental trauma narratives
• Critical theory applications

Recent publications focus on Jewish identity dynamics, Holocaust memory frameworks, and interdisciplinary aesthetics. As director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, she shapes global discourse on trauma and cultural memory through edited works like Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches (2023). Current creative work includes the novel Rare Stuff (2022) and its ecological themes, with Vandervelde Downs in progress.