Academic Faculty
Galia Benziman
Galia Benziman (MA Advisor) is an Alon Fellow (2011-2014) and Associate Professor in English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on British literature of the long nineteenth century; in particular, on Dickens, Hardy, the history of childhood, and the Elegy.
She has published two books: Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture (2012, Palgrave Macmillan) and Thomas Hardy's Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement (2018, Palgrave Macmillan). Her essays appeared in Dickens Studies Annual, Studies in the Novel, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens, and other platforms.
Karin Berkman
Karin Berkman completed her doctorate on the poetry of Seamus Heaney in the English Department at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC project “Apartheid—The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation, 1948-1990,” led by Prof. Louise Bethlehem, she studied the notion of exile in South African poetry.
Her research on South African and African poetry has been published in Critical Arts, Scrutiny and English in Africa. Her research interests include Irish literature, twentieth-century British and American poetry, South African poetry during apartheid and post-apartheid, post-colonialism and literary theory.
Louise Bethlehem
Louise Bethlehem is Golda Meir Fellow (2002-2003) and Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her book, Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath (Unisa Press, Brill 2006), was published in Hebrew translation by Resling in 2011.
She has co-edited nine volumes in the field of South African literature, African Studies and Cultural Studies, including the prizewinning volume South Africa in the Global Imaginary, co-edited with Leon de Kock and Sonja Laden (Unisa, 2004). Between 2014 and 2019, she was Principal Investigator of the research project Apartheid—The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation, 1948-1990 funded by a prestigious grant from the European Research Council (ERC). In recognition of the importance of her research, she was appointed to Academia-Net: an Expert Database of Outstanding Female Scholars and Scientists, with the participation of 47 European science and research organizations. Bethlehem has held research fellowships from the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has served on the Academic Committee of the Institute. She has supervised over 30 graduate students, many of whom have gone on to secure academic appointments in their own right.
Ruben Borg
Ruben Borg (Chair) is an Alon Fellow (2008-2011) and Associate Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include Irish modernism, posthumanism, cyborg theory, and the dialogue between cinema and literature. His work has appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism / modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Poetics Today, and in numerous other journals devoted to twentieth-century literature and film. He has also contributed chapters to collaborative volumes on Deleuze, Beckett, and Posthumanism.
Sanford Budick
Sanford Budick received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1966. Before being appointed Professor of English at The Hebrew University he was Professor of English at Cornell University. At The Hebrew University he served twice as chair of the English department, was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, and was founding-director (1980-2000) of the Center for Literary Studies. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships. He has written books on Dryden, on eighteenth-century poetry, on Milton, on Kant’s relation to Milton, and on the Western theory of tradition.
Zachary Garber
Micha Lazarus
Micha Lazarus is Senior Lecturer in English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He works on the intellectual history and literary culture of Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and in particular on the reception of the classics in sixteenth-century England. He is General Editor of Sources in Early Poetics (Brill), and co-convenor of Poetics before Modernity, an international project on the history of literary criticism. Before coming to the Hebrew University, Micha spent several years as a research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Warburg Institute. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) and a member of the Bar of England and Wales.
Yael Levin
Yael Levin is associate professor of English, the associate provost for academic affairs at the Rothberg International School and President of the Joseph Conrad Society of America. She is currently working at the Mandel Scholion Research Center on 'The Evolution of Attention in Modern and Contemporary Culture'. Her monographs include Joseph Conrad: Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad´s Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her work on modernism, postmodernism, narratology, the subject and disability has appeared in journals and volumes including The Conradian, Conradiana, Partial Answers, Twentieth-Century Literature, Journal of Modern Literature and Journal of Beckett Studies.
Naomi Mandel
Naomi Mandel (BA advisor) was Professor of English and Film/Media at the University of Rhode Island before joining the faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is Associate Professor of English and holds the Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair of American Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary literature and critical theory, with particular interests in the aesthetics and ethics of violence.
She is the author of Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (University of Virginia Press, 2006) and Disappear Here: Violence after Generation X (Ohio State UP, 2015), and has published three volumes of edited essays, including Bret Easton Ellis (Continuum, 2010) and Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (co-edited with Alain-Philippe Durand; Continuum, 2006). Her work on American Slavery, the Holocaust, and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Dialectical Anthropology, and boundary 2. Mandel’s current research focuses on the visual and literary culture of the digital revolution and the Information Age.
Liza Michaeli
Leona Toker
Leona Toker is Professor Emerita of English Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading (2019), and articles on English, American, and Russian writers.
She is Editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, a semiannual refereed academic periodical sponsored by the Institute for Literatures of the Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University. Her current research deals with narratological issues and with Vladimir Nabokov’s midlife works.
Ruben Weiss
Ruben Weiss is a doctoral student in the English Department at the Hebrew University who teaches the tutorial to the introductory course to literary theory. He is a fellow at the Mandel Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and an Associate Editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. His dissertation focuses on how child characters and representations of childhood are used by four nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors—Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and Virginia Woolf—to make sense of British history.
Shira Wolosky
Shira Wolosky received her B.A. from Brown University (summa, Phi Beta Kappa) and her Ph.D. with distinction from Princeton University in Comparative Literature in 1981. She was an Associate Professor of English at Yale University before moving to the Hebrew University in 1985, where she is Professor of English and American Studies.
Her books include Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (Yale UP, 1984); Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language (Stanford UP, 1994); The Art of Poetry (Oxford UP, 2002); “Nineteenth Century American Poetry,” the Cambridge History of American Literature IV (2004); Defending Identity with Natan Sharansky (Public Affairs, 2008); The Riddles of Harry Potter (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010); Feminist Theory Across Disciplines (Routledge, 2013), as well as other writings on literature, religion, and contemporary theory.
Her awards and research appointments include a Fulbright Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Tikvah Fellowship at NYU Law School, and a Drue Heinz Visiting Professorship at Oxford. She was also a Fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, at the Katz Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the Hadassah Brandeis Institute. She is currently working on a book on Jewish Thought and Postmodern Theory, with special focus on Emmanuel Levinas.
Tara Zafft
Her current research and writing interests concern women’s writing and contemporary poetry. She has most recently published works in Rumors Secrets and Lies, Poems about Abortion, Pregnancy and Choice (2022, Anhinga Press), The San Diego Poetry Annual, and Write-Haus.