Eyal Handelsman Katz headshot

Eyal Handelsman Katz

2023-2024 Office Hours: By appointment only.
 
 
Bio
As a Spanish-Israeli international student, before coming to UVA I studied at the University of Valencia where I undertook MAs in English and Secondary Education, as well as the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where I completed an MA in Intercultural Communication as a Fulbright scholar. My dissertation project examines parental figures and their ties to feminist and ethnic movements and discourses in 20th and 21st century Multiethnic American prose. My latest project was a collaboration with the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab to produce a short documentary about my grandmother’s waning memories of the Holocaust. The film is called Słabe Jajko and you can read more about and watch it here.
 
Education
B.A. in English Studies, Universitat de València
M.A. in Advanced English Studies, Universitat de València
M.A. in Intercultural Communication, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
M.A. in Secondary Education, Universitat de València
M.A. in English, University of Virginia
Graduate Certificates in American & Africana Studies, University of Virginia
 
Teaching
ENGL 3002 - History of Literatures in English II (TA Spring 2023)
ENGL 2599 - Literature After Auschwitz (Fall 2022)
ENGL 3740 - Introduction to Asian American Studies (TA Spring 2022)
AMST 2001 - Introduction to American Studies (TA Fall 2021)
LASE 2500 (Launchpad) - Argumentation & Social Justice (Summer 2021)
ENWR 1510 - Social Justice, Critical Race Theory & Argumentation (Fall 2020 & Spring 2021)
 
Awards & Honors
Rachel Winer Manin Jewish Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, 2020-2023
USHMM Silberman Seminar, 2022, 2023
HEFNU Summer Institute, 2023
HEFNU Regional Institute, 2022
Public Humanities Fellow in South Atlantic Studies, 2022
Cornell School of Criticism and Theory, 2022
Religion, Race & Democracy Lab Research Collaborator, 2020-2021
UVa, Summer Institute of Engaged Learning, 2020
Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers Associate, 2018-2019
Fulbright Student Scholar, 2016-2018
 
Selected Talks and Conference Activity
 
"Flipping the Multicultural Plot in Cuban and Chinese American Women's Writing", RMMLA, Denver, 2023.
 
"Ethnic American Women's Fiction in the Late-20th Century: Grace Paley, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros", ENGL3002, Charlottesville, 2023. Guest Lecture.
 
“Jewish American Interethnicities at the Turn of the 21st Century”, MLA, San Francisco, 2023. Invited Panelist.
 
“Jewish American Identification in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries”, Congregation Beth Israel Tikkun Leil Shavuot, Charlottesville, 2022. Invited Talk.
 
“In the Midst of Postmemory: From MAUS to Słabe Jajko”, North-American Fictions of Resistance: History, Memory and Trauma (Graduate Course Invited Talk), Valencia, 2022.
 
“Forgetting the Father to Remember the Mother? Parental Figures in Jewish American Women’s Prose from Antin to Ozick to Obejas”, JAHLIT, Miami, 2022.
 
“Diegetic Dissociation in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition”, MELUS, New Orleans, 2022.
 
“Brown Grotesquerie in Octavio Solís's Lydia”, NeMLA, Baltimore, 2022.
 
"Reflection-Based Grading in the Writing Classroom: An Equitable Alternative?” UVa CTE’s Innovations in Pedagogy Summit, Virtual, 2021.
 
“Love as Resistance in Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ Heads of the Colored People”, MELUS, Virtual, 2021.
 
“Black Grotesque in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, NeMLA, Virtual, 2021.
 
“Feeling vs. Knowing: Representing the Holocaust in Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl””, NeMLA, Virtual, 2021.
 
“Gender, Race, and Utopia in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood”, NeMLA, Pittsburgh, 2018.
 
“Black Sisyphus: Fanon’s Corporeal Malediction as Camusian Absurdism”, NeMLA, Pittsburgh, 2018.
 
“Sisyphus Ignored: Analyzing Albert Camus and Martin Esslin’s Notions of the Absurd”, NeMLA, Baltimore, 2017.
 
“From Project Mayhem to Party Crashing: The Hypermasculine Dystopia in David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club”, SAMLA, Jacksonville, 2016.
 
“Abandonment, Motherhood and Identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping”, 2nd Washington Conference on Trauma, Washington D.C., 2016.
 
“‘So we beat on’: An Absurdist Reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby”, Looking Back: (Re)Visions of the Past in Literature and Film, Valencia, 2015.
 
Research Interests
Multiethnic American Literature
Memory & Trauma Studies
Holocaust Studies
Critical Race Theory