Sicily Lerner

A woman with long hair

Position Title
Graduate Student in Comparative Literature
Associate in Comparative Literature

Bio

Bio

Sicily Lerner is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature. Her dissertation, “Modernist Midrashic Mythmaking: The Urban Suicides of Franz Kafka, Dovid Bergelson, and Bruno Schulz” studies the crossroads of politics, urbanity, aesthetics, transgression, religion, love, and justice through the lens of suicide. By utilizing Bachelardian spatiality, urbanity, and biopolitics, she locates the ways in which the modern reading of justice rests within the micropolitical, or individual. 

Sicily’s research primarily focuses within Jewish political works, specifically works that have been produced by nonZionist and nonBundist authors, and how the modern European metropolis is latent in examining the ruptured aesthetic form of these modern and postmodern works. Her other research interests include trauma representation; 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. 

Sicily currently teaches a COM4 class entitled “Politics, Postmodernism, and Punk” wherein her students study various ways in which art serves as a medium for politics and as a way for individuals to rebel. She also serves as the Internal Vice President for the UC Davis Graduate Student Association. She received her MA in German from UC Davis in 2024 and her MA in English from Boston College in 2020. She received her BA in English with double minors in Film Studies and Creative Writing from Wake Forest University in 2013. 

Sicily is the current Internal Vice President of the Graduate Student Association at UC Davis. You can read about her goals and advocacy work at https://gsa.ucdavis.edu/staff/sicily-lerner

Previously, she has worked  as an editorial assistant; in marketing and management; as a preschool teacher; and has taught English as a foreign language in the Czech Republic. She has undergone approximately 70 hours of pedagogical training with a specialization  in work with students who are nonnative English speakers.

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)