About The Lily Center

The Lily Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures was founded at Harvard University in 2008 to support the study of the languages of Jewish communities across the globe.

The Lily Center seeks to promote, coordinate, and conduct research on Jewish languages and their literatures throughout the world, to collect materials in a variety of Jewish languages and produce compelling translations, and to serve as a digital resource for students and scholars of Jewish languages and interlinguistics.

The Center sponsors a variety of programs throughout the year. At Harvard, the Center sponsors a seminar on Jewish languages and their literatures for graduate and undergraduate students. This year, the Lily Center is convening a panel at the upcoming meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) on "Global Jewish Languages and Literature", to be held March 26-29, 2009. Click here to view the complete program for this conference.

A conference on "Jews and China: Language and Literature" is scheduled for Fall 2009.

The Lily Center is directed by Professor Marc Shell, the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. The Center also houses two graduate research assistants and teaching fellows, Debra Caplan (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) and Isabelle Levy (Comparative Literature).

Our courses and programs are generously sponsored by the Posen Foundation at the Center for Cultural Judaism, the Harvard Asia Center, and the Department of Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.