William
Runyan
Bio:
William is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His chief interest and pursuit beyond the scope of his scholarship, and also in conjunction with it, is literary translation from Yiddish and Spanish to English.

Research Interests:
While his research interests encompass modern Jewish, European and Latin American literatures and intellectual histories, his expertise and primary research focus is on the cross-regional and interlingual entanglements of Yiddish literature in the twentieth century. His dissertation, “Global Form and Fantasy in Yiddish Literary Culture: Visions from Mexico City, Buenos Aires and New York,” examines the historical experience and conceptual development of this literature as it rapidly globalized in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on an extensive corpus of source material in Yiddish, Spanish and Russian—including literary texts, historic periodicals, archival sound recordings, personal correspondence and unpublished manuscripts—William shows how writers, print media and literary works came to navigate ever wider dimensions, and how this expansive scope in turn informed new discourses and practices of literature on a world scale.