Yael Halevi-Wise
19th-century novels (especially Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli); history of the novel as a literary form; comparative analyses of the novel as a genre across time and different cultures; cultural representations of Jews and Judaism in modern literary fiction.
Since I began to work professionally on literature in the 1990s, my main motivation has been to understand how the novel “works” as a genre and how it morphs over time across different cultures. My first book, Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel (Prager/Bloomsbury, 1996) enabled me to create a foundation for my understanding of literary forms as an interactive process that arises out of dynamic arguments among storyteller and audiences with specific cultural expectations about their storytelling in their respective milieus. Thanks to these arguments, their expectations change and artistic forms are continuously transformed. I examined these processes in several literary traditions, including 19th C. England, 17th C. Spain, contemporary Israel, and contemporary Latin America. This range of choices emerged in part from my own multicultural background as an Israeli who grew up in Mexico and studied English and Comparative Literature in Israel and the United States. In 2012, I spearheaded a volume about representations of Spanish Jewish history in the modern literary imagination (Stanford, 2012). More recently in The Retrospective Imagination of A.B. Yehoshua (Penn State UP, 2020) I worked on the entire oeuvre of this leading Israeli novelist and public intellectual, who recently passed away (z”l). I continue at the same time to be fascinated by the works of the great 19th Century English novelists, especially Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brönte, George Eliot, and most recently have become more interested in Benjamin Disraeli.
Impact of ChatGPT on our teaching; Charles Dickens’s narrative techniques; A.B. Yehoshua in a comparative context, e.g. vis-à-vis Faulkner, Dickens, Agnon, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Camus.
Ph.D. (Princeton)
M.A. (Georgetown)
B.A. (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Books
The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua (Penn State University Press, 2020)
Sephardism: Spanish/Jewish History & the Modern Literary Imagination (Stanford University Press, 2012)
Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel (Praeger/Bloomsbury Press, 2003)
- Visiting Professor, Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Haifa University, Spring 2016
- Visiting Professor, Paris INALCO, Fall 2015
- SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2006-09
- FQRSC Programme pour l'établissement de nouveau professeurs-chercheurs, 2006-09
- Lady Davis Fellowship, 2008-09
- W. and F. Hewlett Foundation, "Strengthening Interdisciplinary Connections", 2001
- Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2000-01
- Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, 2007, 2000
1) I particularly welcome students interested in thinking about the novel as a genre: its characteristics in any given period - esp. 19th C. - and its transformations across history and different cultures. 2) I also enjoy supervising creative writing theses, an option that enables students to produce original primary accompanied by a serious scholarly assessment of literary voice, structure and form. 3) As a joint professor of Jewish Studies and English, I’m able to assist students interested in unpacking the fraught history of literary representation of Jews and Judaism in the modern imagination.
Brandeis University
Cornell University
Princeton University