Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor, Comparative Literature Department, UC Berkeley; Assistant Professor, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Yael Segalovitz a 2025–2026 Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor in the Comparative Literature Department at UC Berkeley. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley in 2018, where she was a Townsend Center Fellow and a Posen Fellow.
Her research spans American, Hebrew, and Brazilian modernisms, with a focus on transnational literary exchanges, and she also translates literary works across these cultural contexts. Her recently-published book, How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY, 2024), traces the global circulation of close reading beyond the Anglophone world and its influence on modernist literary production. Her current project explores the resurgence of psychoanalytic object relations theories in the American humanities, giving rise to a hybrid literary genre she terms “Psychoanaliterature.”
Dr. Segalovitz co-hosts the podcast Psychoanaliterature with Professor Anneleen Masschelein, featuring conversations with leading scholars at the intersection of psychoanalysis and literature, including Maggie Nelson, Judith Butler, and Jane Gallop.
Courses
Pack Light: Traversing Translation & Hebrew Literature
Catastrophe: The Jewish Tragic Mode, from Antiquity to Modern Culture
