Na’ama Rokem

Na'ama Rokem is Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago.  Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature & Comparative Literature

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.

Rokem is the organizer of two international conferences at the University of Chicago:  "German and Hebrew: Histories of a Conversation,"  and "German-Jewish Echoes in the Middle East".

She  teaches a variety of courses including: Advanced Readings in Hebrew, The Bible in Modern Hebrew Literature, Multilingualism in Modern Jewish Literature, Writing the Jewish State, and Readings in World Literature. Together with Anastasia Giannakidou (Professor of Linguistics) she has co-taught a course for the Center for Disciplinary Innovation, on: Bilingualism: Cognitive, Linguistic, Cultural and Literary Approaches. In the Spring of 2015, this course will be repeated under the auspices of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, in collaboration with Israeli-Palestinian novelist Sayed Kashua.

Events

18

Oct

Bilingual Knowledge at Humanities Day

 Oct 18, 2014, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
 University of Chicago, Stuart Hall, room 105

What do bilinguals know? There are multiple answers to this question, from multiple disciplinary points of view. Linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars use different tools to account for bilingualism. As collaborators at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago, Linguistics), Sayed Kashua (Israeli-Palestinian novelist and 2014–2015 Mellon Fellow at the Gray Center), and Na’ama Rokem (NELC) plan to bridge these different approaches and experiment with bilingual storytelling. In this talk they introduce their collaboration and describe the different points of departure from which they come to it.