Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor, Comparative Literature Department, UC Berkeley; Assistant Professor, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Yael Segalovitz is a 2026–2027 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 work centers two projects: one on sleep and insomnia in Hebrew literature, and another exploring the resurgence of psychoanalytic object relations theories in the American humanities.
Segalovitz is also the curator of the 2025–2026 Helen Diller Literary Series at UC Berkeley, and currently co-hosts the second season of the podcast Psychoanaliterature, funded by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA), with psychoanalyst and writer Emma Lieber. The podcast features conversations with leading scholars and writers at the intersection of psychoanalysis and literature, including Maggie Nelson, Judith Butler, and Jane Gallop.
Courses:
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Sleep With Me: Literature, Rest, and the Politics of Wakefulness
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What the Self: Psychoanalysis, Autotheory, and Jewish Modernity
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Introduction to Modern Hebrew Literature
