Dr. Rachel S. Harris
Director of Jewish Studies | Herbert and Elaine Gimelstob Eminent Scholar Chair of Jewish Studies | Professor, Communication and Multimedia Studies Compa
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters
Jewish Studies | Communication and Multimedia Studies
Boca Raton Campus
Education
- D. Phil, University of Oxford
- MA, The University of London
- MA General (hons) 2:1, Edinburgh UniversityÂ
About
Dr. Harris received her Ph.D. in Hebrew Literature from The University of Oxford. She received her MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies from the University of London. Before coming to FAU, she was an Associate Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture in Comparative and World Literature and the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her recent publications include An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature (2014) and Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (2017). She is the editor of Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2019), and co-editor of Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (2011) and Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema (2021). Dr. Harris joined Florida Atlantic in 2023.
Rachel S. Harris occupies the Gimelstob Eminent Scholar Chair for Jewish Studies, and is a Professor of Film and Multimedia Studies at Â鶹¾«Æ·ÊÓƵ where she also directs the Program in Jewish Studies. Prior to this, she was an Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature and The Program in Jewish Culture & Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2009-2022). She was also was the Shoshana Shrier Distinguished Visiting Professor at Toronto University. She is active in the Association for Jewish Studies where she served as the chair of the Women's Caucus (2017-2019) and the Association for Israel Studies where she served two terms on the board (2015-2019) and Chaired the 37th Association for Israel Studies Annual Conference "Pluralistic Israel: Women, Minorities and Diversity" in 2021. She has served on the committee for the Yonathan Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies (2019-2022) and as its chair (2021-2022).
Harris is the author of (2017) and  (2014). She is the co-editor of (2021) with Dan Chyutin, which won The Janovics Center Best Book Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies, 2021. She edited (2019), and with Ranen Omer-Sherman she edited (2012).
She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Jewish Identities.
In Fall 2023, Harris will be presenting her research from her recent Fulbright Senior Scholar Award at Tel Aviv University's Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, where she was working on her new project "With a Wider Lens: Recovering Lost Israeli Cinema 1948-1968.