Mikhal Dekel

Distinguished Professor and Director of Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts

Main Affiliation

English

Additional Departments/Affiliated Programs

Rifkind Center

Areas of Expertise/Research

  • Autobiography and Memoir
  • Class, Culture, and Politics
  • Global/Immigrant Literature
  • Literary Theory
  • Refugees

Building

NAC

Office

6/317B

Phone

212-650-6305

Fax

212-650-5410

Mikhal Dekel

Mikhal Dekel

Profile

Mikhal Dekel is Professor of English and Director of the Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Lady Davis Foundation, among others, and is the author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (W. W. Norton 2019); Oedipus in Kishinev (Bialik Institute, 2014); and The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment (Northwestern University Press, 2011). Her articles, translations and blogs have appeared in Foreign Policy, Journal of Comparative Literature, English Literary History, Jewish Social Studies, Callaloo, Shofar, Guernica, and Cambridge Literary Review, among others. Tehran Children has been featured on BBC, C-Span, the NY Times, The Guardian and elsewhere, and is a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Education

  • L.L.B., Tel Aviv University
  • M.A., The City College of New York
  • M.Phil, Ph.D., Columbia University

Courses Taught

  • The Historical Memoir: Archival Research and the Personal
  • Literature and Theory of Migration
  • Representations of Trauma: Text, Theory and Visual Culture
  • Themes in Comparative Literature
  • Law and Literature
  • Non-Fiction MFA Workshop

Research Interests

  • Memory studies; relationship between history and memoir
  • Minority identity; language in Diaspora; theories of post colonialism and nationalism.
  • Critical legal studies; law and ethics
  • Literary representation of trauma