Monica Osborne

Dr. Monica Osborne is a writer and former literature, film, and cultural studies professor with expertise in representations of trauma, multi-ethnic narratives, and critical theory. She is the author of The Midrashic Impulse and the Contemporary Literary Response to Trauma and has written for Newsweek, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Jewish Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Forward, Religion and Literature, Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the US, as well as many other magazines, academic journals, and edited collections. Her writing has dealt with issues including trauma and violence, racism and ideological diversity, immigration, the #MeToo movement, the TSA, Russian-Jewish culture, and the ethics of Holocaust and 9/11 comedy. Monica earned a Ph.D in Literature and Jewish Studies from Purdue University, and subsequently was awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Holocaust and World Culture at UCLA where she taught courses in trauma, literature, and post-WWII German cinema. She has also taught at Loyola Marymount University and Pepperdine University, and is a 2007 graduate of the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory. She is the co-editor of Literature of Exile and Displacement: American Identity in a Time of Crisis, a book used in college classrooms across the country that deals specifically with the immigrant experience in America. Monica has also been the editor of "The Speech Project" at the Jewish Journal. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Jay Karas and son Leo.