Karen Underhill is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the UIC Department of Polish, Russian and Lithuanian Studies, and author of Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity (Indiana University Press, 2024). Her research focuses on multilingual Polish Jewish Culture, changing memory of Poland’s Jewish past, and hybrid and diasporic cultural forms that arose in the multilingual context of 19th and 20th century Poland and Central Europe. In 2001 she co-founded Massolit Books & Cafe in Kraków, Poland, and returned to earn a PhD in Polish and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago in 2011.  She was 2012-2013 Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and joined the University of Illinois Chicago in 2012, where she has focused on developing a multilingual Polish-Jewish Studies curriculum in literature and film. She is currently working on a comparative study of the changing treatment and adaptation of the figures of Jacob Frank and Adam Mickiewicz within both Yiddish and Polish literatures and cultural debates of the 20th and 21st centuries.