Dr. Hannah S. Pressman, a scholar of Jewish languages and culture, has published widely for general and academic audiences. She is affiliated faculty with the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. As the founding director of the Jewish Studies Graduate Fellowship at UW, she spent five years teaching interdisciplinary cohorts of graduate students about the methodologies and history of the Jewish Studies field. Mentorship of emerging scholars and writers, especially women, is a cause very dear to her heart.
Since January 2024 Dr. Pressman has served as co-founder and co-director of the American Ladino League, a non-profit organization supporting the community of Ladino learners and educators in the United States. She is currently a fellow of the Sephardic Stories Initiative at PJ Library-North America. Her first children’s book, featuring a Sephardic girl in Seattle and lots of Ladino, will be published by Intergalactic Afikoman in 2027.
Dr. Pressman focuses her writing on Jewish languages, gender, and religion. She has contributed to volumes such as Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, of which she was also co-editor (Wayne State University Press, 2013); Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice (Brandeis University Press, 2014); What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans) (University of Washington Press, 2018); and The New Jewish Canon: Ideas & Debates, 1980-2015 (Academic Studies Press, 2020). Her essay about crafting an archival Sephardic memoir appears in Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States, published by Koç University Press and the University of Chicago Press in 2021. Forthcoming publications include essays in the edited volume Jewish Women Thinkers (Wayne State University Press, 2026) and The Jews of Rhodes and Kos: Culture, Memory and Identity in a Transnational World (publisher pending, 2027).
Dr. Pressman has extensive experience at the intersection of communications and higher education. As the first Communications Director at the UW Stroum Center, she oversaw the exponential growth of the academic website and e-journal at jewishstudies.washington.edu. Her portfolio in this role included writing accessible scholarly articles for a broad global audience online; guiding faculty and students on developing digital research projects; implementing strategic communications such as annual impact reports and social media campaigns; and interfacing with UW media relations offices, as well as national press outlets, to effectively showcase Stroum Center faculty, students, and resources.
From 2021-2025 Dr. Pressman served as the Director of Education and Engagement for the Hebrew Union College Jewish Language Project. In this role she promoted research on and awareness of the many languages spoken and written by Jews around the world. She crafted monthly newsletters, weekly social media posts, and frequent campaigns to expand the audiences interested in endangered Jewish languages.
Hannah Pressman received her Ph.D. in modern Hebrew literature and an Advanced Certificate in Poetics and Theory from New York University. Besides the memoir genre, her scholarly interests include translation studies, Jewish language philosophy, and religious-secular dynamics. Dr. Pressman was a Wexner Graduate Fellow and MacCracken Fellow at NYU, the Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellow for Yiddish Literature at YIVO, and the Hazel D. Cole Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at UW.
Dr. Pressman’s journalistic pieces, from book reviews to humorous parenting and lifestyle articles, have appeared in such venues as The Forward, Hadassah Magazine, Kveller, JTA News, Lilith, and Tablet Magazine. In 2024 she received a Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Personal Essay from the American Jewish Press Association for her piece “Barbie, Taylor, Margaret and Me” (Hadassah, August 2023).
Dr. Pressman is currently at work on Galante’s Daughter: A Sephardic Family Journey, a multi-vocal memoir which connects the search for her family’s roots to contemporary American Jewish identity. This work, the culmination of two decades of research, brings to light the untold stories of Sephardic women, particularly within the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the African colonial milieu. Galante’s Daughter and a related multimedia project won prestigious Research Awards from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in 2020 and 2022.
Dr. Pressman lives in Seattle with her husband and three children. She is available on a limited basis for scholar-in-residence programs, as a consultant for Jewish book groups, and as an editorial advisor. Please use the contact form to get in touch.
Hannah S. Pressman 