Yitzhak Lewis is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University, in China. He received his PhD in Hebrew and Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2016). Yitzhak’s teaching and research interests include comparative literature in Hebrew, Spanish and Yiddish; literary and cultural theory; transnational writing and world literature. His current book project is a study of marginality and mysticism as literary tropes in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). His recent book, A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity (SUNY Press, 2020), deals with the Russian imperial context of early modern Hebrew and Yiddish letters.