Ellen G. Friedman

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Ellen G. Friedman was born in Kyrgyzstan, a republic of the Soviet Union, within sight of the Tian Shan Mountains bordering China. She began her primary education in Berlin and received her Ph.D., With Distinction, in English from New York University. Her family memoir about Polish Jews is entitled The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story.

Professor of English and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at The College of New Jersey, she has published books with Princeton and Minnesota University Presses, among others, as well as many articles in a range of scholarly and popular journals. She is on the editorial boards of Modern Fiction Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Bearing Witness.

She inaugurated the Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at her college and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on The Limits of Representation and the Holocaust, Memory and the Holocaust, Art and Literature of the Holocaust, and Reading and Writing the Holocaust.

She has given lectures and keynote addresses in the US, Britain, Europe, and Russia and was twice invited as visiting professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, J. W. Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Germany. She has also taught in Paris.

She has appeared on NPR and on other radio and television stations in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. She is a Princeton University Press legacy author. While writing The Seven, A Family Story, she was appointed a Visiting Scholar at the international Biography Center at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and was appointed to Faculty Council, University of Turku, Finland. She has read from her memoir in Europe and the U.S., including Hawaii.