Sharon Oster Ph.D.

• Ph.D., English, University of California, Los Angeles
• M.A., English, University of California, Los Angeles
• M.A., Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
• B.A., English, University of Michigan

Sharon Oster

Currently professor of English at the University of Redlands, I received my Ph.D. in English and M.A. degrees in English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, and a B.A. in English at the University of Michigan. Before joining the U of R faculty, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine, and Visiting Lecturer at UCLA. I have been a repeated Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.), where I have researched oral and written Holocaust testimonies; strategies in Holocaust pedagogies; piloted the Mandel Center’s digital teaching resource, “Experiencing History”; and in June 2017, I participated in a research workshop, “Photography of Atrocity.” In 2019 I was a Fellow at the Holocaust Education Foundation Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University.

RESEARCH

My research interests lie in American literary realism, the novel, memory studies, American Jewish literature, and Holocaust studies. My book, No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Wayne State University Press, 2018), traces the prevalence of the “Hebraic myth” in nineteenth-century fiction, journalism and poetry. This “philosemitic” trope of the noble biblical “Hebrew” has long buttressed Protestant providential narratives as a metaphor for the pre-Christian past, according to Protestant typology. The Hebraic myth, however, renders the Jew an anachronistic, atavistic throwback, an expressly un-modern figure. Confronting the modern “Jew” as part of a social, national “Jewish Problem”—a figure of religious or “racial” difference often subject to racist stereotypes—realist writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska and others struggled to write the “Jew” in time. I show how an understanding of the Jewish place in American literature is incomplete without an account of how, facing the upheavals of modernity, these writers reconfigured a philosemitic myth that imagined Jews outside of time by figuratively placing them in it, as guarantors of a promising American future.

My current book project reveals the ethical and aesthetic stakes embedded in the concept of the Muselmann so frequently referenced in Holocaust literature and visual culture, and whose meaning has long been taken for granted. Tentatively titled Living Death: Rethinking the Muselmann in Holocaust Literature and Visual Culture (under contract, Wayne State University Press), this project challenges widespread assumptions about the term’s stability and coherence according to accounts by Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and others. Drawing on a range of textual and visual sources, the book critically re-evaluates the meaning of the term “Muselmänner” (plural), which is commonly understood to denote those at the bottom of the concentration camp hierarchy and fated to die, since it turns out to have been for many a temporary condition. Living Death also provides a long-overdue study of what we might call the “female Muselmann.” Overall, this book offers a critical reinterpretation of the ways in which Muselmänner-figures and images in survivor accounts, liberation photography, film, and survivor visual art, have become iconic yet problematic literary and visual tropes, that are central to Holocaust memory.

In addition to teaching a wide range of Jewish and American literatures, I engage ongoing work in the Digital Humanities. With support from the USHMM Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University, and the University of Redlands Center for Spatial Studies, I have developed an interdisciplinary GIS mapping project, “Cartographies of Suffering: Mapping Holocaust Accounts,” that teaches students to create digital layered ESRI Storymaps in order to explore and map individual Holocaust survivor accounts on a collective geographical scale.

Experience

Affiliations

• Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) Teaching Grant, 2021-22.

• University of Redlands, Faculty Research Grants, 2016-2022.

• Holocaust Education Foundation Fellowship, Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization, Northwestern University, June 2019.

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington, D.C., Research Workshop Fellowship, “Photography of Atrocity,” June 2017.

• University of Redlands, Spatial Community of Practice Grant, 2015.

• University of Redlands, Faculty Research Grant, 2014-15.

• USHMM Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington, D.C., Fellowship, "Teaching the Holocaust Digitally: A Source Study Approach," 2014.

• University of Redlands, LENS Faculty Development Grant, 2014.

• University of Redlands, Faculty Research Grant, 2013.

• University of Redlands, W. M. Keck Foundation LENS Faculty Fellowship in Spatial Learning, 2012.

• University of Redlands, Nominated, Graves Award, 2011.

• USHMM Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington, D. C., Jack and Anita Hess Seminar for Faculty, Jan. 3-7, 2011.

• University of Redlands, Faculty Research Grant, 2007-08, 2009-10

• University of California, Irvine, Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2003-04

• UCLA, Alfred E. Longueil Dissertation Fellowship, 2002-03

• UCLA, Chancellor's Dissertation Fellowship, 2001-02

• UCLA, Philip and Ada Siff Educational Foundation Graduate Fellowship, (declined), 2002

• UCLA, College of Letters and Science Charles E. and Sue K. Young Graduate Student of the Year Award, 2001.

Presentations