Meyer Weinshel
267 19th Ave S
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
Since 2023, I have been associate director at the Center for Austrian Studies (CAS), and affiliated with the University's Center for Jewish Studies. Along with the CAS director, I oversee all Center business—including public events (speaker series, colloquia, and conferences), publications (e.g., serving as editor and working with the Center's affiliated academic presses), award and fellowship competitions, research initiatives, budgets & fundraising (liaising with Institutional Advancement), and Center staffing.
I am a scholar of German and Austrian Jewish literature, history & culture, and of modern Yiddish language, literature & culture. My scholarly work has also intersected with genocide studies, memory studies, translation studies and multilingualism, LGBT+ histories in Central Europe and the United States, and immigration history. Before completing my Ph.D. in 2022, I taught all levels of German studies coursework in the UMN Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch (GNSD). I also served as a visiting lecturer of Yiddish studies in the Ohio State University's Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2021, where I taught Yiddish language and Yiddish cultural history. From 2018 to 2020, I was also involved with various Yiddish pedagogy initiatives at the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA)—piloting In eynem (the Book Center's Yiddish textbook) prior to its publication, working for the Book Center's Steiner Yiddish Summer Program, and designing and teaching Yiddish community-education courses with Jewish Community Action (Minneapolis, MN). I continue to promote the study of Yiddish culture through community outreach in the Twin Cities and beyond.
From 2021-2023, I was the Collections and Outreach Lead at the UMN Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS), and was also a Co-PI (and later postdoctoral researcher) for the Minnesota Human Rights Archive project. While in these roles, I created online exhibitions for CHGS, and also co-led a team of undergraduate and graduate student staff to design a panel exhibition for the Minnesota Human Rights Archive: The Global Reach of Local Activism: Minnesota's Human Rights Stories (on display in Elmer L. Andersen Library in spring and summer 2024).
Educational Background
- PhD: Germanic Studies, History, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 2022
- MA: Germanic Studies, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 2016
- BA (with Honors): German Studies; History; Classics, Macalester College, 2012
Specialties
- Modern Yiddish Literature and Culture
- German & Austrian Jewish Literature and Culture: 19th Century-Present
- Translation, Migration, and Multilingualism
- Queer Studies
- Archives
- Second Language Acquisition; Endangered Languages & Language Revitalization