Rate My Professor Rachel Harris

Professor Rachel Harris serves as the Herbert and Elaine Gimelstob Eminent Scholar Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of Film and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, where she also directs the Program in Jewish Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew Literature from the University of Oxford and an M.A. in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Before joining FAU in 2023, Harris was an Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature and in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from 2009 to 2022. She also held the position of Shoshana Shrier Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto.

Harris's research centers on Hebrew literature, Israeli cinema, and Jewish studies, examining themes of gender, war, national narratives, and transnational influences in Israeli arts and culture. Her major publications include Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (2017), An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature (2014), the co-edited Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema (2021) with Dan Chyutin—which won the Janovics Center Best Book Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies—Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2019, editor), and the co-edited Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (2012) with Ranen Omer-Sherman. She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Jewish Identities and has led initiatives such as chairing the Women's Caucus of the Association for Jewish Studies (2017-2019), serving two terms on the board of the Association for Israel Studies (2015-2019), chairing its 37th Annual Conference in 2021 titled "Pluralistic Israel: Women, Minorities and Diversity," and chairing the Yonathan Shapiro Award committee (2021-2022). In Fall 2023, she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Tel Aviv University's Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, working on "With a Wider Lens: Recovering Lost Israeli Cinema 1948-1968."