Faculty Fellow

Na'ama Rokem

Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature & Comparative Literature University of Chicago

Biography

Na'ama Rokem works on Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and Spaces of Zionist Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2013) argues that prose - as a figure of thought, a mode, and a medium - played an instrumental role in the literary foundations of the Zionist revolution. She is now writing a book about the encounter between Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai, as well as articles on multilingualism and translation in the works of Hannah Arendt and Leah Goldberg, on the politics of translation in Israel. With Amir Eshel, she coedited a special issue of Prooftexts, on German-Hebrew relations.

nrokem@uchicago.edu

Topics

Featured Project

Skyward-facing detail of a metal sculpture made of letters from various alphabets

Translation Networks and the Stakes of Comparison: Convergences and Crossings Between Arabic and Hebrew

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2025 – 2026

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Projects

The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, 1820–1948

Detail of a 19th century map of the Middle East

The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, 1820–1948

Historians, literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists will come together to examine the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is a collaborative, multidisciplinary project examining the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses of modernity and modernization in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We bring together historians, literary scholars, linguists, ...

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2021 – 2024

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