director of jewish studies
Dr. rachel s. harris
Elaine and Herbert Gimelstob Eminent Scholar Chair in Judaic Studies
Rachel S. Harris occupies the Gimelstob Eminent Scholar Chair for Judaic Studies, and is a Professor of Film and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University where she also directs the Program in Jewish Studies. Prior to this, she was an Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature and The Program in Jewish Culture & Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2009-2022). She was also was the Shoshana Shrier Distinguished Visiting Professor at Toronto University. She is active in the Association for Jewish Studies where she served as the chair of the Women's Caucus (2017-2019) and the Association for Israel Studies where she served two terms on the board (2015-2019) and Chaired the 37th Association for Israel Studies Annual Conference "Pluralistic Israel: Women, Minorities and Diversity" in 2021. She has served on the committee for the Yonathan Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies (2019-2022) and as its chair (2021-2022).
Harris is the author of
Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema
(2017) and
An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature
(2014). She is the co-editor of
Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema
(2021) with Dan Chyutin which won The Janovics Center Best Book Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies, 2021. She edited
Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict
(2019), and with Ranen Omer-Sherman she edited
Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture
(2012).
She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Jewish Identities.
In Fall 2023, Harris will be presenting her research from her recent Fulbright Senior Scholar Award at Tel Aviv University's Steve Tisch School of Film and Television where she was working on her new project "With a Wider Lens: Recovering Lost Israeli Cinema 1948-1968."