Dr. Leonard Stein

In my academic life, I’m a literary scholar and lecturer who received a PhD at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature in 2021. In my creative life, I’m a songwriter, performing musician, and poet. I like to merge these lives. As a comparatist, I look for connections between mediums, temporalities, languages, cultures, and identities. My research centers on the intersections between music and literature, on film and literature, on crypto-Jewish and Sephardic identities, early Modern English literature, medievalism, archives, and American music history. I am currently working on the archival poetry of the Victorian writer Grace Aguilar, on converso manuscripts from New Mexico, and singing more. 

Music in American Literature

Film and Literature

Hip-Hop: An American Culture

Introduction to Poetry

Latin American History, Civilization and Culture

“The Musical Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Sephardic Women.” Sephardic Horizons 14.1 (2024).

“The Sephardic Palimpsests of Emma Lazarus,” Jewcy: Jewish Queer Lesbian Feminisms for the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Marla Brettschneider. Albany: SUNY Press, 2024. 63-78.

“Jewish Flow: Performing Identity in Hip-Hop Music.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 38. 2 (2019): 119-139.

“Jubanidad and the Literary Transmission of Cuban Crypto-Judaism.” Caribbean-Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice. Ed. Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. 135-153.

“The Wilderness Within: Crypto-Jewish Literature and the Construction of a Desert Identity.” Journal of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Crypto Jews 7 (2015): 122-136.