Samuel Spinner

Samuel Spinner is an Associate Professor and Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Chair in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in Yiddish and German-Jewish literature and culture from the 19th century to the present, with a focus on modernism, visual culture, Holocaust studies, and the history of anthropology.

• Education: BA (Johns Hopkins University), PhD (Columbia University, 2012)

Research Interests span Jewish primitivism, museum studies, and the intersection of literary and ethnographic discourses. His current project, Monuments of Books, examines how Yiddish literature redefined Holocaust remembrance through textual rather than physical monuments.

Publications include Jewish Primitivism (Stanford University Press, 2021) and translations of early modern Yiddish texts like Meneket Rivkah (JPS, 2009). He serves as co-editor for Indiana University Press's "German Jewish Cultures" book series and editorial board member of In Geveb journal.

• Awards: MLA Book Prize (2022), NEH Fellowship (2024)