Israel Studies Faculty

Karen Grumberg

Arnold S. Chaplik Professor of Israel and Diaspora Studies, Department of Middle Eastern and Program in Comparative Literature
Israel Studies Faculty Coordinator 
PhD UCLA, Comparative Literature

Karen Grumberg has taught in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at UT Austin since 2004, and has served as Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies since 2017. She works primarily on modern Hebrew literature in comparative contexts. Her second book, Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution (Indiana UP, 2019), is a study of how modern Hebrew literary texts in dialogue with the British and American Gothic tradition reorient the Jewish conceptualization of the past. Her first book, Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (Syracuse UP, 2011), considers the way seemingly apolitical ordinary places invite, sustain, or subvert ideological paradigms. Dr. Grumberg is the editor of Middle Eastern Gothics: Spectral Modernities and the Restless Past, (forthcoming in 2022, University of Wales Press), a collection of nine chapters on diverse Gothic works in the major Middle Eastern languages, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish. She also edited a special issue on “Translational Transactions” in the Comparative Literature journal Dibur (2020) and a special issue on “Poe in the Middle East” in the journal Poe Studies (2020).

 

Recent Publications:

Grumberg, Karen (forthcoming). “Middle Eastern GlobalGothics: Queer Gothic Narratives of Israel/Palestine in Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani and Ayman Sikseck’s Tishrin.” In Rebecca Duncan and Justin Edwards (Eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.

Grumberg, Karen (2020). “The Greatness of Smallness: Amos Oz, Sherwood Anderson, and the American Presence in Hebrew Literature.” Journal of Israeli History 38:1, 1-27.

Grumberg, Karen (2020). “‘Dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before’: Poe, Degeneration, and Revolution in the Hebrew Imagination.” Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation 53, 47-65.

Grumberg, Karen (2018). “‘The Whole Content of My Being Screams in Contradiction Against Itself’: Uncanny Selves in Sayed Kashua and Philip Roth.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 36:3, 1-30.

Grumberg, Karen (2017). “Between the World and the Yishuv: The Translation of Knut Hamsun’s Markens grøde as a Zionist Sacred Text.” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 36:1-2, 111-136.

Grumberg, Karen (2016). “Gothic Temporalities and Insecure Sanctuaries in Lea Goldberg’s ‘The Lady of the Castle’ and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death.’” Comparative Literature 68:4, 408-426.

 

 

Esther Raizen

Associate Professor, Middle Eastern Studies/Hebrew
PhD 1987 UT Austin, Foreign Language Education

Esther Raizen returned to the Hebrew classroom in Fall 2020, after ten years of serving as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Liberal Arts. Former Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and President of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew (NAPH), Dr. Raizen works in the boundary between Jewish history, literature, memory studies, and applied linguistics. She is the author of three Hebrew language textbooks (Modern Hebrew for Beginners; Modern Hebrew for Intermediate Students; and Yours Truly), and has published a bilingual anthology of Israeli war poetry, No Rattling of Sabers: Israeli War Poetry 1940-1990 (1996). Her recent articles study women engaged in clandestine activities during World War II, Holocaust literature, Hebrew children’s literature in the pre-state period and the early days of the State of Israel, toy travel, and commemoration practices in Israel.

Recent Publications:

Esther Raizen, 2024, “On Mischievousness, Intertextuality and Current Events in Three Early Plays by Anda Amir-Pinkerfeld.” (Hebrew). Hebrew Higher Education 26.

Esther Raizen, 2024, “The Gnome Karashindo as an Imaginary Friend, Go-between, and Trainer in the work of Deborah Omer.” (Hebrew) Accepted for publication in Sifrut Yeladim Vanoar.

Esther Raizen, 2023, “Terrible Noise: Jean-Claude Pecker on Loss, Remembrance, and Silence.” Shofar, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 41:3, pp. 188-221.

Esther Raizen, 2022. “These Were the Doll’s Travels: From Berlin to Hollywood, from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, from a Sweet Story to a Nightmare.” (Hebrew) Hador, The Hebrew Annual of America, 2022, pp. 142-169.

Esther Raizen, 2020. “And the People Were Complaining: Reading Avraham Regelson’s The Dolls’ Journey to the Land of Israel.” (Hebrew) Hador, The Hebrew Annual of America, 2020, pp. 141-157.

Ganit Mayer and Esther Raizen, 2020. “Speaking Poetry: Poetry Slam and Spoken Word as Pedagogical Tools in the Hebrew Classroom” (Hebrew). Hebrew Higher Education 22, pp. 87.98.

Esther Raizen, 2019. “Thoughts from the Periphery: On Uzzi Ornan’s Grammar of the Mouth and Ear in its New Edition” (Hebrew). Hebrew Higher Education 21, pp. 209-220. (review article)

 

 

Ahmad Agbaria

Assistant Professor of Instruction, Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies

Ahmad Agbaria is Assistant Professor of Instruction of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching focus on the study of history of the modern Middle East, Israel/Palestine, and colonialism and post-colonialism in the Arabic-speaking world. He is the author of The Politics of Arab Authenticity (Columbia University Press, 2022). Currently, he writes research on the formation of the post-Ottoman (dis)order in the wake of WWI through the life and career of an Arab intellectual. He holds degrees from Tel Aviv University (B.A., M.A.), and the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D.)

 

Recent Publications:

“Cultural Decolonization: The Rise of the Margins in Arab Thought.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Vol. 43, No. 1, 2023. 83-93  

• “Dār al-Ṭalīʿah and the Question of Arab Authenticity in the 1960s.” Journal of Arabic Literature 52 (Fall 2021) 228–253.

• “The Arab Rationalist Association and the Turn to Nahdah in Contemporary Arab Thought.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

Courses Taught:

The Arab-Israeli Conflict

Arab Citizens of Israel

1914—Reforming the Arab East

Middle East: Adjustment and Change in Modern Times