Debra Caplan is Assistant Professor of Theatre in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her research focuses on Yiddish theater and drama, theatrical travel, artistic networks, and immigrant theater and performance. She was the founding Executive Director of Harvard’s Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research and is currently a member of the Mellon School’s Advisory Board. She is the co-founder of an interdisciplinary research collective, The Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, which is currently developing several projects that apply digital humanities tools to the study and preservation of Yiddish theater. Debra is also a stage director, dramaturg, and translator for the theater. From 2012 – 2014, she was the dramaturg for Target Margin Theater, working with director David Herskovits to develop two seasons of Yiddish theater material.

Caplan has also worked as a faculty coleader in the Translation research group of the 2014-2016 Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.

Programming

Seminars & Working Groups

Translation

We investigate how translation can be a process of transformation.