Yitzhak Lewis is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University. His research interests include comparative literature in Hebrew, Spanish, and Yiddish, literary and cultural theory, transnational writing, and world literature. He is author of A Permanent Beginning: Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity (2020) and Games of Inheritance: Kabbalah, Tradition, and Authorship, in the Writing of Jorge Luis Borges (2025). He has edited a volume on “Yiddish and the Transnational in Latin America” for In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (2021) and is currently co-editing a collection titled One Hundred Years of Yiddish Literature in China about the reception history of Jewish literature in China from World War I until today. His work has been published in Variaciones Borges, In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, and Journal of Latin American Jewish Studies.

Lewis has a B.A. in comparative literature, psychology and creative writing from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. in Hebrew and comparative literature from Columbia University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he taught at Columbia University.