Galit Hasan-Rokem
Vistiting Professor of Israel Studies
In residence Spring Quarter 2010
Galit Hasan-Rokem, the Max and Margarethe Grunwald Professor of Folklore at the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will be offering "Ethnography and literary genres in Talmudic-Midrashic literature" at the Divinity School in the Spring Quarter of 2010. Her main research interests include ethnographic, folkloristic and literary approaches to ancient Hebrew literature especially of the classical Rabbinic periods, i.e., the Talmudic-Midrashic corpus; the cultural variation of contemporary Israel, focusing on interfaces between various groups; the conceptualization of mobility in European literature with special reference to Jews; theory of folklore, especially semiotics and structuralism; and the folk literary and discursive genre of the proverb.
Her Ph.D. dissertation from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was published as Proverbs in Israeli Folk Narratives: A Structural Semantic Analysis (Helsinki, 1982). Among her other publications in English: Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (Stanford, 2000); Tales of the Neighborhood: Jewish Narrative Dialogues in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 2003). Her edited volumes include The Wandering Jew: Interpretations of a Christian Legend (Bloomington IN, 1986, coedited with A. Dundes); Untying the Knot: on Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes (New York, 1996, coedited with D. Shulman); The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology (New York, 1999, co-edited with S. Kaufman and T. Hess); Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel: Life History, Politics and Culture (Hanover NH, 2008, coedited with R. Kark and M. Shilo). She has published three volumes of her poetry in Hebrew; some English translations have appeared, especially online. Her service activities include acting as literary editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal, as a founding member of its editorial board since 1993.
Professor Hasan-Rokem has served as visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and at various Scandinavian universities. She has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and is presently a Senior Fellow at Scholion - Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Jewish Studies, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Many of her students teach at research universities in Israel and elsewhere.
