Yanara Friedland
Associate Professor
About
I am a writer and translator born in Berlin, whose research interest include border poetics, autofiction, critical and creative insurgencies in archives, and experiments with documentary forms. My first book Uncountry: A Mythology (2016) selected for the 2015 Noemi Fiction Award, narrates the gaps between official history and the more unreliable spaces of private memory and unspoken unofficial history. My second book Groundswell (Essay Press, 2021), a collection of border narratives, interviews, testimonies and biographies investigates the living archive of ruins, walls, and borders. The essays include lived experiences of borderers, walks along the geopolitical line, as well as my own confrontation with spatial and temporal bordering processes. Both books are forthcoming in German translation with Mattes & Seitz. Recent work has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Asymptote, and Matters of Feminist Practice. My class offerings reflect my own evolving research interests and include courses on Mixed Genre Forms, Living Archives, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma, and Border and Diaspora Literatures. I also curate the occasional reading series Mutter Courage and its attached internship program at BRUNA PRESS, which gives Fairhaven students the opportunity to work with a local art non-profit and gain experience in curatorial and editorial projects. In all of my courses I attempt to situate students at the crossroads of lived experiences and social realities in which narratives are created. I am particularly interested in cultivating and experimenting with narrative construction and modes of listening as a way to more profoundly participate in the complexities that so often haunt the human experience: uncertainty, (dis)location, and identity. Within the classroom and beyond, I encourage students to awaken to the task, to presence, to what is always already happening around us.