Joseph Benatov holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation is titled “Looking in the Iron Mirror: Eastern Europe in the American Imaginary, 1958-2001.” He has also written on Jewish identity politics in Philip Roth's early fiction (Artidea Press: Sofia, Bulgaria); the sensationalism of U.S. representations of life behind the Iron Curtain (forthcoming in Poetics Today); and competing national narratives of the saving of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II (forthcoming, Nebraska UP).