Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Na'ama Rokem works on Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Zionist Remaking of Literary Space (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming) 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. Her current book project deals with bilingualism and auto-translation in German-Jewish and Hebrew literature, with chapters on Heinrich Heine, M.Y. Berdichevsky, Yahuda Amichai, Paul Celan and Hannah Arendt. In 2011-2012, she was a faculty fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.

Rokem is the organizer of a series of international conferences at the University of Chicago. The first, "German and Hebrew: Histories of a Conversation," took place on April 15-16, 2010. A follow-up event - on German-Jewish Echoes in the Middle East, will take place on May 7-8, 2012 (http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/echoes/).

Rokem teaches a variety of courses including: Advanced Readings in Hebrew, The Bible in Modern Hebrew Literature, Multilingualism in Modern Jewish Literature and Readings in World Literature. Together with Anastasia Giannakidou (Professor of Linguistics) she is teaching a course for the Center for Disciplinary Innovation, on: Bilingualism: Cognitive, Linguistic, Cultural and Literary Approaches.

Publications [Selected]

• "Performing the City of Slaughter" (Hebrew) Mikan 21, Fall 2011
• "German Hebrew Encounters in the Poetry and Correspondence of Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan" Prooftexts, 2010, 30, 97-127 PDF
• "Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl and the Poetics of Space" Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2009, 8.1, 65-82
• "Zionism before the Law: The Politics of Representation in Herzl and Kafka" Germanic Review, 2008, 83.4, 321-342 PDF

Conference Participation and Presentations [selected]

• “Hegel's World: Prose” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Long Beach, California, April 2008
• “Remember Heine! Bialik’s Detour to the Halakha” German Studies Association Conference, San Diego, October 2007
• “Heine's Monument and the Poetics of Space” Association for Jewish Studies Conference, San Diego, December 2006
• “Codeword Heine: Beyond Assimilation and Emancipation in German Jewish Culture” German Studies Association Conference, Pittsburg, September 2006

Invited Talks [Selected]

• “Kafka Goes to Palestine” University of Michigan, Roundtable on Kafka in the Middle East organized by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, April 2012

• "Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan: Navigating Between German and Hebrew" Annual Arnold Band Lecture in Modern Jewish Literature, Center for Jewish Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, March 2012

• "The Zionist Legal Imagination: From Herzl to the Declaration of Independence" Internal Conference on the Declaration of Independence, Tel Aviv University, December 2011

• “With the changing of horizons comes the broadening of the horizon: Multilingual Narrative Modes in M.Y. Berdichevsky’s Miriam” The Association for European-Jewish Literary Studies Conference, Antwerp, September 2011

• "The Horizons of German-Hebrew Bilingualism" Works in Progress Group in Modern Jewish Studies, AJS Annual Conference, Boston, December 2010

• "German-Hebrew Encounters in the Poetry and Correspondence of Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan" Modern Jewish Worlds Workshop and Humanities Center Workshop on Jewish Studies, Harvard University, Octoboer 2010

• “Recreated in Translation: The Hebrew Heine” Brandeis University, Jewish and Near Eastern Studies Colloquium, October 2010

• "The Place of Heinrich Heine: Between Germany and Israel in Upon a Certain Place" Conference in honor of Haim Beer, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, March 2010

Panels and Workshops Organized [selected]

• “German and Hebrew: Histories of a Conversation”, International Conference, University of Chicago, April 2009
• “Poetry on the Borders of Hebrew and German”, MLA Annual Convention, San Francisco, December 2008
• “The Enduring Power to Provoke: Heinrich Heine Debated in North America, Germany and Israel”, German Studies Association Conference, St. Paul, October 2008
• “Between Berlin and Jerusalem: The German Hebrew Conversation Reconsidered” International Workshop at the Division of Languages Cultures and Literatures, Stanford University, May 2008

Honors and Awards [selected]

• Spring 2008 Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
• May 2008    Stanford Department of Comparative Literature, Bradley Rubidge Memorial Dissertation Prize for the Best Dissertation for the Period 2006-2008
• 2006-2007  Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center