Co-organizers

Position: Assistant Professor of English
School: Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville
Donavan L. Ramon, who earned his doctorate in African American literature from Rutgers University, is an assistant professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. A specialist in African American and African diasporic literatures, he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in these fields. He has published articles on Philip Roth and Alice Dunbar-Nelson and, most recently, guest edited a special double issue of the South Atlantic Review on the ninetieth anniversary of Nella Larsen's Passing. His first book, Striking Features: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing Narratives, was published by Mercer University Press in 2024. It explores the psychoanalytic motivations for jumping the color line in African American literature.
Abstract: The Inner African: Blacks, Jews, and the Problem of the Color Line
Biography - Old: Donavan L. Ramon, who earned his doctorate in African American literature from Rutgers University, is an assistant professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. A specialist in African American and African diasporic literatures, he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in these fields. He has published articles on Philip Roth and Alice Dunbar-Nelson and, most recently, guest edited a special double issue of the South Atlantic Review on the ninetieth anniversary of Nella Larsen's Passing. His first book, Striking Features: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing Narratives, will be published by Mercer University Press in 2024. It explores the psychoanalytic motivations for jumping the color line in African American literature.
Person Type: Co-organizers

Position: Professor of Jewish Studies and History
Leadership Title: Academic Director, the Bildner Center
School: Rutgers University-NB
Nancy Sinkoff is the Academic Director of the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers University. She is author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (2004, digital 2020), and of From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (2020; pb 2022), the 2020 National Jewish Book Award winner in the category of Biography. With Rebecca Cypess, she co-edited Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin (2018), winner of the outstanding book prize from the Jewish Studies and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society, and with Halina Goldberg, Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (2023). Forthcoming is her co-edited volume, A Jew in the Street: New Perspectives on European Jewish History.

Professor Sinkoff is a recipient of numerous fellowships, including from the Mellon Foundation, the IIE Fulbright Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Person Type: Co-organizers

Symposium on Black and Jewish Americans

Ramon, Donavan

Sinkoff, Nancy

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