Nora Cornell is a recent graduate of Wellesley College, where she created the Book Studies major and explored the intersections of text, image, and materiality as both a scholar and a letterpress printer. After completing her honors thesis on nineteenth-century tkhines, she began learning Yiddish at the Steiner Summer Program at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA. Her artist books are held by Wellesley College, The Yiddish Book Center, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Klingspor Museum of Typography, and by artists and scholars around the globe. Her poetry can be seen in The Blue Nib, Furrow Magazine, and Prairie Home Magazine.
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Nora Cornell
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Pedagogy
How to Read Without Text: A Book History Perspective on Tkhines
Nora Cornell
I stumbled backwards into the topic of tkhines and almost accidentally ended up on a yearlong (or really, year-plus) study of Yiddish-language women’s prayers. It was only then, after I’d already submitted the paper and the art piece and the final reflection, that I decided it might be time to actually learn some of the language I’d been studying around for more than twelve months.
Feb 23, 2026