Agnieszka Legutko
Agnieszka (Agi) Legutko is Senior Lecturer in Yiddish and Director of the Yiddish Language Program in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University, where she teaches Yiddish language and literature. She received her Ph.D. with distinction in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. She specializes in modern Yiddish literature, language, and culture, women and gender studies, and spirit possession in Judaism, and her forthcoming book explores the trope of dybbuk possession in modern Jewish cultures. Her research interests include gender, trauma, memory, performance and the body represented in Jewish literatures, theater, and film as well as digital humanities and language pedagogy in the post-method era. She is the recipient of the 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, and the 2022 Provost’s Innovative Course Design Grant for building an online archive as a meaningful engagement with the past in a literature course. She loves sharing her passion for Yiddish with her students in the classroom and beyond.