Aaron Kreuter

Dr. Aaron Kreuter is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture. His postdoctoral project, Unsettled Jews: Jewish World Literature and Settler Colonialism, is a book-length study of contemporary Jewish fiction that confronts the settler colonial paradigm. His dissertation, “‘Playing Jewish Geography’: Diaspora, Home, Nation-State, and Zionism in Contemporary Canadian and American Jewish Fiction,” was awarded York University’s Faculty of Graduate Studies Dissertation Award; an excerpt from the dissertation won the Philip Roth Society Siegel McDaniel Award for Graduate Student Writing. Aaron is the author of the short story collection You and Me, Belonging (2018), and the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs (2016). His second book of poems, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, is forthcoming from Oskana Poetry and Poetics in Spring 2022

Areas of Academic Interest

Jewish literature, diaspora literature, post-colonial studies, settler colonialism studies, world literature, contemporary fiction, climate fiction, eco-poetry.

Selected Conference Presentations

2021: “Jewish Alternate Historical Fiction and Settler Colonialism.” Modern Languages Association (MLA), Ryerson University.

2019: “Philip Roth and the Fictionalization of American Settler Colonialism.” Philip Roth Society Conference: Roth Remembers. New York University, New York. April 9.

2018: “‘The Jewish Semitone’: The Fraught Geographies of Diaspora and Israel in David Bezmozgis’ The Betrayers.” 24th Annual Jewish American and Holocaust Literature (JAHLIT) Symposium, Miami. November 12.

2018: “Letting It Move Through You: The Israeli Land And The Jewish Body in Canadian Jewish Fiction.” Association of Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC), University of Victoria. June 22.

2017: “‘Longings Even More Unimaginable’: The Complications of Jewish Justice in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock.” Canadian Association for American Studies Conference (CAAS), OCAD University. October 28.

2017: “Herzl v. Uris: Altneuland and Exodus in Comparison.” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), University of Utrecht. July 9.

2017: “Scattering Seed: Sexuality, Land, and Zionism in Fields of Exile.” Association of Canadian and Québécois Literature (ACQL), Congress, Ryerson University. May 29.

2017: “‘To Suppress Those Forty-Odd Pages’: On The Ethics of Operation Shylock’s Excised Chapter.” Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), Congress, Ryerson University. May 27.

2016: “Diasporic Affects in Ayelet Tsabari’s The Best Place on Earth.” Maladies of the Soul, Emotion, Affect: Indigenous, Canadian, and Québécois Writings in the Crossfire of a New Turn, The Banff Center. September 24.

2016: “Diasporic World Literature: Preliminary Exploration(s).” Institute for World Literature Colloquium, Harvard University. July 11.

2016: “‘A Meat Locker in Hebron’: Meat Eating, Occupation, Cruelty, and Nation in To the End of the Land.” Association of Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC), Queens University. June 17.

2010: “Issues of Diaspora in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Modernist Studies Association XII, University of Victoria.

Selected Publications

“Jewish Affect During the Second Intifada: Terror, Love, and Procreation in Ayelet Tsabari’s ‘Tikkun.’” All the Feels: Tous les sens: Affect and Writing in Canada / Affect et écriture au Canada. Eds. Marie Carrière, Ursula Mathis-Moser, and Kit Dobson. The University of Alberta Press, 2021. Pp 225-244.

“Against ‘Jewish Totalism’: Operation Shylock: A Confession’s Missing Chapter.” Philip Roth Studies vol. 15, no. 2 (2019), pp. 24-43.

“‘A Meat Locker in Hebron’: Meat Eating, Occupation, and Cruelty in To the End of the Land.” Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought vol. 7, no. 1 (2019). Special Issue: Muddied Waters: Decomposing the Anthropocene.