Michal Peles-Almagor

Dr. Michal Peles-Almagor is a scholar of Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies, focusing on twentieth-century Hebrew literature, German-Jewish culture, and modernist theater. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago where she taught courses in Jewish studies, literature, and theater. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History; the Hebrew Literature Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and the School for Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests include Jewish cultural history, multiculturalism, Zion-diaspora relations, and critical theory. Her articles were published in Naharaim, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, Odot, etc. Her forthcoming book manuscript, Writers at the Threshold: Jewish Belonging and the Rise of the Modernist Novel, 1900-1950, examines how Jewish writers turned to novelistic writing to negotiate their attachment to and rejection from the German-speaking sphere before and after the Shoah. Her work has been supported by the UC-Mellon Foundation, The Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago, Israel’s Ministry of Aliya and Integration, and the Einstein Stiftung Foundation. She is the recipient of the Leo Baeck Prize the study of German-Jewish history and culture (2022). Starting October 2024, she will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.