Faculty biography - Natania Rosenfeld
Natania Rosenfeld grew up in the small, Midwest college town of Oberlin, Ohio. Her parents were both professors of German, and she began traveling to and in Europe at a young age. Immersed in a German school in first grade, she learned the language in a flash. She received her BA in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1985, and went on to study at Princeton University, where she received her Ph.D. with a dissertation on Bloomsbury writer Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf (published in book form as Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf by Princeton University Press in 2000.) She also writes poetry, essays, and short stories, and she is currently working on a novel that deals with World War II and its aftermath in the lives of a small group of Jewish and Christian Poles.
Rosenfeld’s more recent travels have included two stays in London (2003 and 2007) when her husband, Neil Blackadder, was Director of the ACM London program; a summer plus a half year in Berlin; five weeks in Israel studying Yiddish at Tel Aviv University; and brief trips to Lithuania, where her mother was born, as well as to Poland. She has spent time in Dublin, Paris, and Florence and yearns to travel to Spain. She is most interested in twentieth-century literature and history, and her favorite writers—the ones she studies and teaches—apart from Virginia Woolf, include James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jean Rhys, W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and J.M. Coetzee. She has taught courses on Woolf and Joyce, on the literature of the Holocaust, on literature of imprisonment, on Jewish-American literature, and on literary Modernism.
Rosenfeld also loves art, minored in art history as an undergraduate, and very occasionally tries her hand at drawing and painting. She is excited about the visual component of the London program and plans to intersect with it whenever possible through readings and field trips. London is a visually spectacular city, with layers upon layers that yield endless information to the careful eye. It is also, as everyone knows, quite possibly the most distinguished literary city in the world, and she looks forward to navigating it in and through books with the students in her class in 2012.