MARIANNE HIRSCH was born in Romania and immigrated to the United States with her parents in 1962. She went to high school in Providence, Rhode Island, and studied Comparative Literature at Brown University where she received her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. She taught at Dartmouth College for thirty years, and is currently William Peterfied Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Women and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York. She is Vice-President of the Modern Language Association of America. She is the winner of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim, ACLS, Rockefeller, Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, AAUW, Wellesley Center for Research on Women. She is the former editor of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America. She has written, edited or co-edited fifteen volumes, including a book on mothers and daughters in literature, The Mother/Daughter Plot, several books on photography and memory including Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory and The Familial Gaze, and several books on feminist criticism and theory, including Conflicts in Feminism. For the last two decades, she has been writing about cultural memory, particularly about the inherited memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Her latest book Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-authored with her husband Leo Spitzer, is a family/communal memoir about the city in which her parents grew up and survived the Holocaust. Hirsch and Spitzer live in New York city and in Norwich, Vermont. They have been writing collaboratively for the last ten years. Hirsch's The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust is forthcoming in 2012. Her recent co-edited book with Nancy K. Miller, Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory features the work of 24 writers, artists and scholars exploring the obsession with origins and "return" in contemporary culture.