LeiAnna Hamel

LeiAnna X. Hamel currently serves as a visiting assistant professor in Jewish studies at Smith College. She was previously Yiddish lecturer and director of the Yiddish and Ashkenazic studies program at The Ohio State University. Hamel received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures with a graduate certificate in Jewish culture and society from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Hamel is a literary scholar with teaching and research interests in Yiddish studies, gender and sexuality studies, literature and science. She is preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled Undisciplined Bodies: Deviant Female Sexuality in Russian and Yiddish Cultures. Undisciplined Bodies examines the representations of women’s sexuality and eroticism in Yiddish- and Russian-language literary, medical, and journalistic texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her translation work currently focuses on the Soviet Yiddish writer and scientist Shifra Holodenko. This project, tentatively titled Bound to the Earth: An Anthology of Shifra Holodenko’s Poetry, was awarded a 2024-2025 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship.