Associate Professor of Comparative Literature ; Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures
About
Areas of research: comparative approaches to modern Russian, Polish, and Czech literatures; philosophy in literature; poetics; translation in theory and practice
Languages: Polish, Russian, Czech
Benjamin Paloff received the Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University in 2007 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since then. He is the author of Lost in the Shadow of the Word (Space, Time and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe) (Northwestern University Press, 2016), which in 2015 reveived the American Comparative Literature Association's Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize. He has also published two collections of poems, And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. A former poetry editor at Boston Review, his poems have appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere, and he has translated several books from Polish and Czech, including works by Richard Weiner, Dorota Maslowska, Marek Bienczyk, and Andrzej Sosnowski. He has twice received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts—in poetry as well as translation—and has been a fellow of the US Fulbright Programs, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Michigan Society of Fellows. At Michigan he is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.
