RESEARCH INTERESTS

Dr. Gollance's research is broadly concerned with the ways dance, theatre, gender, and the body mediate Jewish experiences of modernity. One of the leading scholars of European Jewish dance, her work engages with the emerging field of literary dance studies from a Jewish Studies perspective. Her first book considers transgressive dancing as a way of understanding the dramatic cultural changes Jews negotiated in the period between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust. Several articles and translation projects reexamine the contributions of Yiddish women writers, with a particular focus on Yiddish plays by women. Her work has been supported with research fellowships from institutions including the Center for Jewish History (USA), Association for Jewish Studies (USA), Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (USA), Österreichischer Austauschdienst (Austria), YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (USA), Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History (Israel), and Fulbright Commission (USA). Her peer reviewed articles have appeared in Austrian Studies, Dance Chronicle, Eighteenth-Century Studies, In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, Jewish Social Studies, The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, and Prooftexts. She has also co-edited journal special issues of Feminist German Studies (with Kerry Wallach) and In geveb (with Joel Berkowitz and Nick Underwood).

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Dr. Gollance is the Managing Editor of Plotting Yiddish Drama, an initiative of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project to create a digital database of Yiddish play synopses. In this capacity, she has published short works of public scholarship about different aspects of the Yiddish dramatic repertoire. Her other writings for a general audience concern topics such as Jewish mixed dancing, pedagogy, workplace harassment in Yiddish literature, and the European refugee crisis. Dr. Gollance has given talks about her research at culture festivals such as KlezKanada, KlezNorth, the Yiddishland Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, and Yiddish New York, and has taught and led Yiddish folk dancing in university, festival, and community settings. She has also introduced films on topics related to her fields of expertise at the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival, Lund University (Sweden), and for the "Oy, Revolt!" Yiddish film series she curated at the University of Chicago. She is currently involved with efforts to develop a Yiddish theatre troupe in London, and was a co-organizer of the 2024 "Season of Yiddish Theatre" series (a collaboration between UCL, the London Jewish community centre JW3, and the Yiddish Café Trust). This series included a rehearsed reading of her translation of Tea Arciszewska's 1958 play Miryeml in March 2024 (directed by Leo Doulton), which was followed by an April 2024 rehearsed reading at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York (directed by Caraid O'Brien).