Biography

Evan Goldstein is a scholar of religion and literature, with a particular focus on American Judaism. Working between Religious Studies, Jewish Studies, and Comparative Literature, his work explores the politics and genealogies of core modern concepts, including religion, history, literature, and the West. He is completing a book entitled Afterlives: Jewish Melancholia and the Aesthetics of the Secular, which reads figures of loss, mourning, and haunting in Jewish culture in conversation with theories of sovereignty to identify the aesthetic forms of modern Jewish politics. Other areas of research interest include Yiddish and Jewish modernisms, critical theory, the politics of Jewish Studies, and the American writer Cynthia Ozick. His writing appears in Comparative Literature, Religion & American Culture, Prooftexts, Studies in American-Jewish Literature, Shofar, and Parapraxis; he is currently working on the legacies of Orientalism in contemporary Jewish culture and the aesthetics of sacramentality in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (the greatest novel ever written). At UTK, he is also an active member of the Center for Social Theory and the Associate Chair of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies.

Selected Publications

“”Homeland, the Jew, and Fascism’s Visual Style,” Contending Modernities (forthcoming, 2026).

“‘Wonderful Silence’: Anna Margolin and the Afterlives of Yiddish Modernism,” Comparative
Literature (forthcoming, 2026).

“Jewish-American Literature in the Ruins of the University,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Jewish Studies (forthcoming, 2026).

“Freud’s Jewish Closet,” Parapraxis Magazine, September 16, 2024,
Freud’s Jewish Closet — Parapraxis

“Lectures to Specters: Ozick’s Genealogies,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History,
vol. 40, no. 3 (2024), 140-174.

“Moloch and Monotheism: Ozick’s Aestheticism,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, vol.
43, issue 1 (March 2024), 29-42.

“‘A Higher and Purer Shape’: Kaufmann Kohler’s Jewish Orientalism and the Construction of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, vol. 29, no. 3 (Fall 2019), 326-360.