He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in the spring of 2001. Kligerman spent several years studying in Germany at the University of Freiburg on a Fulbright Fellowship. His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century German literature, philosophy and visual arts, and he is especially interested in German-Jewish literature and Holocaust studies. Kligerman is currently looking at how poetic invocations of trauma in the works of Paul Celan have been translated into the space of visual media, especially the architecture of museums and memorials in Berlin.