Laurence Roth Laurence Roth is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies and Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Program. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has taught American literature and American Jewish literature at UCLA, Pomona College, and the University of Judaism. Dr. Roth is the recipient of the 2005 John C. Horn Distinguished Service Lectureship for outstanding scholarship and service to the university, and in 2004 he held the Charles W. and Sally Rothfeld Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania.   Dr. Roth is the author of Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories (Rutgers U. P.) and editor of Modern Language Studies, the academic journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association and the 2005 Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ Phoenix Award Runner-Up for Significant Editorial Achievement. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shofar, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries (U. of Pennsylvania P.), The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches (Rutgers U. P.), Cambridge Dictionary of Jewish History, Religion, and Culture (Cambridge U. P.), Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder From the “Other” Side (Garland Publishing), Symposium, The Antioch Review, and The Jacaranda Review. He is currently co-editing, with Nadia Valman, The Routledge Companion to Modern Jewish Cultures.   Dr. Roth teaches American Literature: 1865 to the Present, Contemporary American Literature, The Beats Reconsidered, Reading/Writing Critical Non-Fiction (click here to see Red, Inc., Susquehanna University's book review and literary criticism weblog), Study of Literature, and seminar in American Popular Literature, as well as courses in Jewish studies such as American Jewish Literature, Jewish Literature, American Jewish Film, and The History and Culture of Jewish Cuisine. In addition, he directs honors projects and independent studies in literary and cultural theory, publishing, popular literature, film and television, Jewish/Christian relations, and comics and sequential art theory.

"Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories is written in an engaging academic prose that draws in the reader effortlessly, carrying him or her along in its flow. Roth brilliantly combines original textual analysis and close readings of film with relevant theoretical and background material to produce an exciting and insightful piece of literary criticism of outstanding quality. This book should find its way into every university library in the Anglophone world—not only for what it tells us about contemporary U.S. detective fiction, Jewish-non-Jewish relations, and issues of faith in so accomplished a fashion but also because it is an exceptional and inspiring piece of scholarly work that sets the standard for literary studies." --Shelley Godsland, Clues: A Journal of Detection Vol. 25.3 (Spring 2007) "What will readers uncover when they inspect Inspecting Jews? Quite simply, one of the liveliest contributions to the field of Jewish cultural studies that has appeared in some time. Bringing together the Talmud and consumer research techniques, midrash and police procedurals, this is a work about 'kosher hybridity' a term that Roth has coined to describe new forms of Jewishness in America." --Norman Finkelstein, author of Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity

Modern Language Studies Volume 37, No. 1 Summer 2007 A publication of the Northeast Modern Language Association Laurence Roth/Editor

The Beats Class - Fall 2006