Josephine Woll (1950–2008)

Josephine Woll grew up in the Bronx, New York, with two sisters. She attended both secular and Yiddish schools before entering William Smith College (now known as Hobart and William Smith Colleges) in Geneva, NY at age 16. She then earned master's and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After brief teaching stints at Duke University, Colgate College, and the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, in 1977 she joined the faculty of Howard University, where she became a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature. Her first book was a critical annotated bibliography of samizdat (underground) Russian literature, published in 1978, which ran to a second edition in 1983. She focused on film studies after that, and wrote three books on film, including Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (2000), now considered a classic, the first book to investigate, and analyze Soviet cinema from the aftermath of Stalin's death in 1953 to the late 1960s during Kruschev's rule. She was married to writer and editor Abraham (Amik) Brumberg. Woll died at age 57 in 2008.