Professor Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the Vice-President of the Modern Language Association of America. Professor Hirsch was born in Romania and educated at Brown University where she received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees.  

Hirsch’s work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. During her time in residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Hirsch gave a lecture on her work on postmemory: the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have with the personal, collective and cultural trauma of their parents. 

Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust; Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (co-authored with Leo Spitzer); and Rites of Return: Diaspora, Poetics and the Politics of Memory (co-edited with Nancy K. Miller).