Department of History

Erin Faigin

Email: faigin@wisc.edu

Address:
Advisors: Tony Michels, Amos Bitzan, Susan Johnson, and Cindy Cheng

Erin Faigin

Biography

My work focuses on the experience of Yiddish speakers living outside of New York City in the early twentieth century. I am interested in how Yiddish speakers living in the Midwest related to Yiddish speakers living in New York and how those living in New York related to those in the Midwest. I ask some of the following questions in my research: What kinds of networks and institutions connected Yiddish speakers living in small towns to those in larger cities? How did regional hubs relate to one another? How did Yiddish speakers define the Midwest as a region and how did their definition of that region change over time? How did technological advances and economic shifts shape the texture of Yiddish life? In asking these questions, my research expands the geographical boundaries of Yiddish culture in the Jewish American past.

Education

M.A. History, UW-Madison, 2019
B.A., History, UC Berkeley, 2016

Field

  • U.S./North American History
  • Jewish History

Working Dissertation Title

  • “American Jewish History from the Provintsn: Trans-Atlantic and Trans-American Yiddish Immigrant Regionalism, 1882-1948”

Selected Publications

Courses Taught as TA

  • History 102 – American History from the Civil War to the Present
  • History 152 – History of the American West since 1850
  • History 219 – The American Jewish Experience: From Shtetl to Suburb

Courses Taught as Instructor

  • History 227 – Race and Place in the Upper Midwest