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Research Activity in the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts

Research at the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts is diverse, and takes place in all the fields included in the department: literature, film studies, linguistics and language, theater, musicology, art history and cultural studies.

These are some of the research topics being performed by the academic staff of the department:

Literature: Modern Hebrew literature; Hebrew poetry; the history of Hebrew literature; correlation between Hebrew literature and Israeli society, politics and culture; the poetics of literature; ethnicity and gender in Hebrew literature; ethnicity in the works of the Sami Michael; representations of Mizrahi women in Hebrew literature; the modern novel (particularly British and European) in the 18th- and 19th-century; literature and psychoanalysis; critical theory of literature.

Film Studies: Ideology and nationalism, subjectivism, gender and trauma as reflected in Israeli and Palestinian films; spectator theories; cinema and literature; historical memory in cinema; space and time in cinema.

Language: Slang metaphors; contemporary Israeli speech.

Theater: Theatrical improvisation as educational mean; theater festivals; the community-based theater.

Musicology: Mozart in context; the German operas of Michael Haydn; the music of Jean Sibelius.

Art History: Local art and artists: Zionist symbols in Israeli art; art in Israel before the establishment of the state until 1978; contemporary Israeli art. Foci of gender in medieval art: iconography of the bible; Illustrated Byzantine manuscripts; Byzantine art in view of gender studies. A book titled An Obscure Portrait. Imaging the Reality of Women in Byzantine Art was recently published (Pindar Press, 2009).

Cultural Studies: Historical, economic, and cultural mapping of the field of art in Israel in its first decade: artists, works (of painting, sculpture and architecture), artists circles, theorists, critics, public projects, and "The First Ten Years" exhibition (Jerusalem, 1958) as an event summarizing the activity in the sphere of visual arts in that period; multi-cultures in Israel; Jewish-Hebraic-Israeli and inter-cultural contacts; "pain and pleasure".

Interdisciplinary research: The "languages of art" – theories which link literature, drama, film, music and visual art; space and place in literature, psychoanalysis and culture; law and literature; law and culture.