About
Emma Avagyan (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research examines how Hebrew, Yiddish, and Armenian writers navigated processes of language modernization in the 19th-century Russian Empire. She works at the intersection of intellectual history and sociolinguistics, focusing on diglossia, multilingualism and monolingualism, translation practices, and the gendered dimensions of language use.
Her work has been published in the Special Issue: Jewish Languages: Diglossia in Judaism under the title “Bridging Hebrew and Yiddish: Dvora Baron’s Multilingual Vision in Ogmat Nefesh.”
Emma is also interested in Hebrew language pedagogy. She has taught Hebrew as a foreign language at Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences (2019–2021).
Research interests:
- Language revival and standardization
- Comparative Historical Sociolinguistics
- Teaching Hebrew as a Foreign Language
