CUNY trustees name CCNY’s Mikhal Dekel Distinguished Professor

Mikhal Dekel, the noted City College of New York academic and award-winning author, is now a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at CCNY. Her appointment, by the City University of New York Board of Trustees, cites her “internationally renowned career, scholarship and teaching of the highest caliber.”

The Stuart Z. Katz Professor in the Humanities & the Arts at City College and current chair of the English Department, Dekel is an internationally recognized scholar of comparative literature (with a focus on 20th century English and Hebrew), Jewish studies and cultural history. 

She’s also the author of three highly acclaimed books including the best-selling “Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey,” the finalist in numerous awards among them the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Contributions to Jewish Literature, the Chautauqua Institution Prize for Significant Contribution to the Literary Arts and the 2019 National Jewish Book Awards for Writing Based on Archival Material and Literature.

Hugely popular, “Tehran Children” was featured in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and many other publications and media outlets., including the BBC, C-Span and NPR. An expanded paperback edition of “Tehran Children” was published in Dec. 2021 with the title “In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust.” The German-language edition, “Die Kinder von Teheran,” was published in April 2021, with a Hebrew translation scheduled for publication in Sept. 2022.  A documentary film based on the book was produced by Iran Wire. The book has earned Dekel invitations to deliver more than 60 talks since its publication. 

Dekel’s first two books, “The Universal Jew: Modernity, Masculinity and the Zionist Moment,” and “Oedipus in Kishinev,” respectively, established her as a leading scholar in gender and cultural studies with a focus on Jewish studies. 

Her scholarship and teaching have earned her a National Foundation for the Humanities Faculty Research Fellowship, and a Lady Davis Fellowship from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  

Dekel joined City College’s professorial ranks as an assistant professor in 2005, was promoted to associate professor in 2010 and to full professor in 2015. She’s served as the Director of CCNY’s Rifkind Center for the Humanities and the Arts since 2016.

Dekel earned an MA in English Literature from CCNY and her PhD in Comparative Literature, with distinction, from Columbia University. She also holds a BA in Law from Tel Aviv University’s Buchman School of Law.

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