Sicily Lerner

Bio

Sicily Lerner is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Davis. She received her MA in English from Boston College (2020) and her BA in English with double minors in Film Studies and Creative Writing from Wake Forest University (2013). Her dissertation is tentatively entitled “Modernist Midrashic Mythmaking”.  

Sicily’s research interests focus on the ways in which the personal politics of Jewish people in the twentieth century are refracted into aesthetic representations, rupturing the traditional realist traditions that preceded them. By particularly focusing on nonZionist authors and painters (Franz Kaka, Marc Chagall, Dovid Bergelson, and Bruno Schulz), the subversion and rebellion against greater Jewish and gentile populations alike posit the authors she studies against their personal political societies as well as the majority contexts in which they lived.  

Other research interests include Holocaust Literature; refugee and exile texts; space, the home, and urbanity; subversion; Hegelianism; the politics of love writing; Surrealism; biopolitics; literature and the law; post-structuralism; new historicism; dialecticism; existentialism; and punk rock. 

Currently, she is teaching a COM 3 class entitled “Modern Places, Modernist Spaces” wherein her undergraduate students apply Gaston Bachelard’s conceptions of the home and the city to modernist works in order to study the ways in which safety and placement change across the twentieth century. Sicily is also the GSA Secretary at UC Davis, as well as the Events Coordinator for the Jewish Studies program. Previously, she has worked as an Editorial Assistant; a Marketing Manager; a tutor for nonnative English speakers; and as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language based out of the Czech Republic.

Presentations

“Beyond the Pale: The Jewishness of Punk Rock Literature,” NEMLA, Boston MA March 2020

Research Interests

Holocaust Literature; refugee and exile texts; space, the home, and urbanity; subversion; Hegelianism; the politics of love writing; Surrealism; biopolitics; post-structuralism; new historicism; dialecticism; existentialism; and punk rock.

Languages

German, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Czech, French

Education and Certificates

• MA English (Boston College, 2020)
• TEFL certified (received TEFL Worldwide-Prague, 2016)
• BA English, minors Film Studies and Creative Writing (Wake Forest University, 2013)
• MA German Language and Literature (UC Davis, 2024)
• MA Comparative Literature (UC Davis, 2024)