Giovanna Truong (USA)

Giovanna Truong studies early modern Yiddish typography, specifically the linguistics of materials printed in the special handwriting-style typeface called mashket or vaybertaytsh. She is deeply grateful to the Ertegun Scholarship for making her DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages possible.

In middle school, Giovanna made the fateful decision to study German due to a wonderful teacher and a thriving German-immigrant cultural scene in her native Wisconsin. While her undergraduate degree at Yale was in physics — with a dissertation focussed on supercooled water levitation — she continued with German classes and eventually stumbled across Yiddish. This, along with a letterpress printing seminar, inspired her to examine material histories of Yiddish texts.

In 2024, she earned her MSt in Yiddish Studies from the University of Oxford (Wadham College) with a dissertation on the linguistics of Sholem Aleichem’s epistolary novel Marienbad for which she won the Taube Prize for Student Writing in Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She also presented her work on a 1609 Hebrew-Yiddish prayerbook at the Minneapolis Hebrew Type Symposium that year.

From 2024–2025, she was the Yiddish Book Center’s Fellow in Bibliography and Translation, which involved cataloguing (and using) the Center’s unparalleled historic Yiddish type collection, schlepping books, giving tours, guiding students, and editing translators’ works for publication. 

Meanwhile, she has written and illustrated for the Yale Daily News and Yale’s Shibboleth, performed as president of the Yale Klezmer Band, and defied gravity as president of two juggling clubs. In her undergraduate years, she also founded the Repository of Yiddish in Translation, which publishes student translations of Yiddish works. At Wadham, she coxed the second open-side boat, and she will continue her quest for blades during her DPhil.