Naomi Brenner Named 2026–27 Global Arts + Humanities Society of Fellows Awardee

Naomi Brenner, Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, has been named a 2026–27 Faculty Fellow of the Global Arts + Humanities Society of Fellows.

Brenner’s project, Literary Trash: The Art of Entertainment Fiction, explores how popular entertainment fiction moved across linguistic, cultural, and national borders in the early twentieth century. Focusing on a long overlooked corpus of Yiddish and Hebrew novels once dismissed as illicit or low brow pleasures, Brenner examines how their marginal status within literary culture enabled them to circulate widely between Europe and the Middle East.

Expanding her study of mass entertainment, Brenner’s fellowship research will also examine Ottoman Ladino (Jewish Spanish) novels alongside other commercial forms such as radio dramas and films that traveled between and connected global Jewish communities. Her project highlights how popular culture, often excluded from literary canons, played a powerful role in shaping transnational cultural exchange.

Brenner’s work speaks directly to the 2026–27 Society of Fellows theme, Cultures in Motion, which considers culture as dynamic, mobile, and resistant to fixity across time and space.