Penn Graduate Student Sonia Gollance will spend ten months conducting research and participating in a seminar at the Center for Jewish History (New York) as a 2016-2017 Sophie Bookhalter Fellow in Jewish Culture. Now in its 15th year, the Center’s Fellowship program offers financial support to humanities scholars, across different stages of their careers. This distinguished community of scholars has used the Center’s resources to produce scholarship that adds to historical knowledge and advances the field of Jewish Studies. Fellows have published their work in leading presses and journals and hold positions at prestigious universities and cultural institutions in the United States, Europe and Israel. Gollance's dissertation, "Harmonious Instability: Mixed Dancing and Partner Choice in German-Jewish and Yiddish Literature," draws upon perspectives from German-Jewish Studies, Yiddish Studies, Dance Studies, and Gender Studies to explore the literary trope of Jewish mixed-sex dancing and how it conveys concerns with gender roles, boundary-crossing, and the body. In the coming year, she will explore the collections of the Center's partner institutions, including the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Leo Baeck Institute.

Sonia Gollance also has received a 2016-2017 Completion Fellowship from the Association for Jewish Studies. The program, in its first year, provides fellows with financial support and a mid-year professionalization workshop. Fellows also share their research with a general audience through a public lecture or workshop. The purpose of this public speaking component is to give fellows crucial experience in making their work accessible to an interested but non-expert public, and to help satisfy the great demand for engaging and sophisticated discussion of Jewish history, literature, religion, and culture. Gollance will complete her dissertation, "Harmonious Instability: (Mixed) Dancing and Partner Choice in German-Jewish and Yiddish Literature," in New York.