People

2005-06 Research Associates and Visiting Faculty

Gannit Ankori
Visiting Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Religion and Society

email: gankori@hds.harvard.edu   phone:  617.384.8377

Gannit Ankori's most recent book—a pioneering study entitled Palestinian Art—is scheduled for publication by Reaktion Books, London, in October 2005. It is a ground-breaking volume based on painstaking research, primary visual sources, and numerous interviews with Christian, Muslim, and Druze artists who live in the occupied Palestinian territories, within the State of Israel, and in exile.

Professor Ankori is the author of two additional books and several articles on the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, among them: Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo's Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation, 2002; Frida Kahlo: Diary, Art and Life, 2003; a major catalogue essay for Tate Modern's 2005 Kahlo retrospective "Frida Kahlo: The Fabric of Her Art"; "The Hidden Frida: Covert Jewish Elements in the Art of Frida Kahlo"; and a book chapter devoted to Kahlo's interpretation of Freud's Moses and Monotheism, "Moses, Freud and Frida Kahlo." She has also curated the acclaimed museum exhibition in New York: "Frida Kahlo's Intimate Family Picture" (see the online exhibition).

In addition to her three books, Ankori has lectured in diverse venues and has published in many journals, anthologies, and catalogues on the visual representation of gender-related issues (e.g., "The Jewish Venus," 2001); on the construction of post-colonial identities ("Islamic Elements in Contemporary Palestinian Art: Secularization and Hybridity," 2004); on exile and trauma (e.g., "Dis-Orientalisms: Absent Bodies and Embodied Displacements in Contemporary Palestinian Art," 2003); and on the ethics and aesthetics of hybridity.

She received her PhD (summa cum laude, 1995) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory. She was appointed Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Department of History of Art and Architecture (2004-05) and Visiting Associate Professor at Tufts University's School of the Museum of Fine Arts.