Holocaust literature expert Kitty Millet is third tenure-track faculty member in growing program

SAN FRANCISCO, August 6, 2004 -- The Jewish Studies Program at San Francisco State University recently hired its third tenure/tenure-track faculty member, Kitty Millet. An assistant professor focusing on modern Jewish thought, Millet begins this fall.

Millet will teach Holocaust Literature; Judaism, Religion and Text; and Introduction to Jewish Studies. Her areas of research focus on the Jewish experience in Europe, the Middle East and Americas, with a publication emphasis on theories of witness in Holocaust literatures. Her current manuscript project is "The Recognition of Holocaust Witness: Western Aesthetic Experience and its Violation."

"Her impressive scholarly expertise in Jewish thought and literature constitutes a major addition to our curriculum and to the intellectual life of the program," said Fred Astren, director of the SFSU Jewish Studies Program. "What's more, her personal energy brings magnetism to the classroom and will be an asset in our institutional and personal relationships both on and off campus."

For the previous five years, Millet was an SFSU lecturer in comparative and world literature teaching courses on myth, the epic and the novel.

"I look forward to exploring with my students the diversity of a Jewish literary tradition that gets at the breadth of Jewish identity as that breadth is experienced," said Millet, a Berkeley resident.

Millet earned a doctorate in cultural studies and comparative literature and master's degree from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and bachelor's degree in comparative literature from University of California, Irvine.

Founded in 1993, the SFSU Jewish Studies Program attracts a diverse group of students from many racial and ethnic backgrounds, including participants in SFSU's elders programs and other community members. Students learn a variety of Jewish history, thought and culture from a renowned faculty that includes Director and Professor Fred Astren, who has enjoyed a visiting professorship at UC Berkeley and visiting fellowship at Oxford University's Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and Marc Dollinger, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility. The Marvin L. Silverman Jewish Studies Reading Room, named after one of the program's founding faculty, contains a special collection of more than 2,000 academic, reference and historical books on Jewish subjects. The collection also contains full original transcripts from the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials.

For more information about the Jewish Studies Program, call (415) 338-6075, send e-mail to jewish@sfsu.edu, or visit: www.sfsu.edu/~jewish.