People

2007-08 Research Associates and Visiting Faculty

Miryam Segal

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Judaism

email: msegal@hds.harvard.edu   phone: 617.384.8328

Miryam Segal is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, where she teaches courses in poetry, gender and literature, Midrash, Modern Hebrew literature and literary theory. Before coming to Indiana, she was a visiting scholar at Tel Aviv University. Dr. Segal earned her doctorate in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and her bachelor's degree from Harvard College. Her research interests include theories of poetic and literary language and the uses of tradition.

Her forthcoming book, Accent: the Poetics and Politics of a New Sound in Hebrew Poetry, analyzes the political and literary ramifications of an accent shift in poetic Hebrew in the 1920s—a change fraught with controversy and anxiety about the very possibility of a national poetic canon. While at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. Segal will begin work on a new project whose focus is Hebrew and Israeli poetry by women and the ways it has challenged and shaped accepted notions of the nation's relationship to both women and religion in pre-State Palestine and in Israel.

Photograph courtesy Miryam Segal.