Skip over navigation

Lital Levy

Department/Program(s):
    Position: Assistant Professor
    Title: Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature.
    Field: Hebrew and Arabic literatures, literary histories, and cultural studies; intellectual and literary history of Arab Jews; diaspora and migration; non-Western literary enlightenments/ renaissances; New Historicism.
    Office: 123 East Pyne
    Phone: 609-258-4089
    Office Hours: Academic Year Leave




    B.A. (Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures), Columbia University (1996), Master of International Affairs, Columbia University (1997), Ph.D. (Comparative Literature), U.C. Berkeley, 2007; 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, Culture Clash: Israel/Palestine Read Inside Out juxtaposes Arab writers of Hebrew with Jewish writers of Arabic to interrogate the limits of linguistic "possession" and "transgression."

    Selected Publications

    "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, 2009).