Benjamin
Paloff
Benjamin Paloff received the Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University in 2007 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since then. He is the author, most recently, of Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities (Columbia University Press, 2025); Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (Northwestern University Press, 2025); and vs. Computer: A Theosophy, a collection of poems (Archimboldi, 2026). His other books include Lost in the Shadow of the Word (Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe) (Northwestern University Press, 2016), which was named 2018 Best Book in Literary Studies by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and two earlier poetry collections, And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has translated over a dozen books and many shorter literary and theoretical texts from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish, notably works Dorota Masłowska, Marek Bieńczyk, Richard Weiner, and Yuri Lotman, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows (2007-2010), Poland’s Book Institute (2010, 2025), the Stanford Humanities Center (2013), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2009, 2016), among others. His research focuses on philosophical dilemmas, particularly in metaphysics and the ethics of representation, in modern Central and Eastern European literature, as well as on translation theory and practice.
Benjamin Paloff received the Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University in 2007 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since then. He is the author, most recently, of Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities (Columbia University Press, 2025); Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (Northwestern University Press, 2025); and vs. Computer: A Theosophy, a collection of poems (Archimboldi, 2026). His other books include Lost in the Shadow of the Word (Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe) (Northwestern University Press, 2016), which was named 2018 Best Book in Literary Studies by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and two earlier poetry collections, And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has translated over a dozen books and many shorter literary and theoretical texts from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish, notably works Dorota Masłowska, Marek Bieńczyk, Richard Weiner, and Yuri Lotman, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows (2007-2010), Poland’s Book Institute (2010, 2025), the Stanford Humanities Center (2013), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2009, 2016), among others. His research focuses on philosophical dilemmas, particularly in metaphysics and the ethics of representation, in modern Central and Eastern European literature, as well as on translation theory and practice.
