Office: 457 EPB     Phone: 353-2464     E-Mail: lara-trubowitz@uiowa.edu Curriclum Vitae Courses

Lara Trubowitz

Modernist Literature, Jewish-American Literature, Cultural Studies and Empire Studies

Lara Trubowitz joined the English department faculty in 2003. Her teaching and research interests include empire studies, twentieth-century British political and cultural history, modernist literature, Jewish-American literature, and Jewish Cultural studies. Most recently, she has published articles on antisemitism and narrative structure in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and on antisemitism and anti-immigration legislation in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Britain.

In her current book project, Conspiring To Be Civil: Antisemitism, Philosemitism, and the Modernist Moment, she combines modernism and Jewish cultural studies with British cultural and political history to examine the impact of what she calls "civil" antisemitism on modernist literary practice. She is also co-editing a collection of essays on philosemitism in twentieth-century politics, film, literature, and popular culture. The book includes material on Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and examines contemporary works from Arnaud Desplechin's 1999 film Esther Kahn to Kristina Grish's 2005 bestseller, Boy Vey!: The Shiksa's Guide to Dating Jewish Men. This is Lara's second edited collection. The first, Contemporary Italian Women Poets: A Bilingual Anthology, was published in 2001. The book, which she co-edited with Cinzia Sartini Blum, includes translations of the work of twenty-five writers, and analyzes post-World War II developments in Italian women's poetry in relation to changing political and cultural trends in Italy from the early 1900s to the late 1990s. 

In addition to her teaching and research, Lara is an executive board member of the Jewish Cultural Discussion group of the MLA. In February 2005, she co-organized the University of Iowa's first festival of Yiddish literature and culture. She is currently teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on Jewish-American literature, racism and antisemitism in Anglo-American Modernism, British fascism, and Virginia Woolf.