Lital Levy
B.A. (Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures), Columbia University, Master of International Affairs, Columbia University, Ph.D. (Comparative Literature), U.C. Berkeley; Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, 2006-2008 and 2009-2010. Lital Levy's research encompasses Hebrew and Arabic literatures and cultures both separately and in conjunction; she specializes in historic and contemporary zones of contact between the two languages. She has worked on the intellectual and literary history of Arab Jews in the late 19th-century Arab East (Iraq, Greater Syria, and Egypt), particularly their participation in the modern Arabic and Hebrew renaissance movements; on modern Hebrew literary history; and on contemporary Hebrew and Arabic writing in Israel/Palestine. Her current book project examines the poetics and politics of language and metalanguage in literature by Jewish and Palestinian writers in Israel/Palestine.
Selected Publications
"Reorienting Hebrew Literary History: The View from the East," in Prooftexts 29:2 (2010), 127-172.
"Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq," in Jewish Quarterly Review 98:4 (Fall 2008), 452-469.
"Self-Portraits of the Other: Toward a Palestinian Poetics of Hebrew Verse," in Transforming Loss into Beauty: Essays in Honor of Magda al-Nowaihi, eds. Marle Hammond and Dana Sajdi (American University in Cairo Press, 2008), 343-402.
"Self and the City: Literary Representations of Jewish Baghdad," in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 26 (2006): 163-211.
"From Baghdad to Bialik with Love: A Reappropriation of Modern Hebrew Poetry, 1933," in Comparative Literature Studies 42:3 (2005): 125-154
"Exchanging Words: Thematizations of Translation in Arabic Writing From Israel," in Comparative Studies of South Africa, Asia, and the Middle East 23, no.1-2 (2003): 106-127.
"Partitioned Pasts: Arab Jewish Intellectuals and the Case of Esther Azhari Moyal (1873-1948)" forthcoming in The Making of the Arab Intellectual (1880-1960): Empire, Public Sphere, and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood, ed. Dyala Hamzah (Routledge, 2010).
