About

Lital Levy is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her research interests encompass comparative literature, cultural studies, critical theory, and intellectual history, with a focus on religion and literature. She works at the intersection of comparative literature, Jewish studies, and Middle Eastern studies, emphasizing the inclusion of non-Western and minority languages and perspectives within these fields. Her scholarship primarily explores the contexts of Palestine/Israel from the 19th century to the present, the modern Arabic renaissance (Nahda), and the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). Levy's work investigates multilingualism, translation, language politics, world literature, diaspora, transnationalism, and East-West literary relations, often at the nexus of literature and history or cultural studies and religion. Her notable contributions include her book 'Poetic Trespass,' which examines multilingualism, translation, and language politics in Israeli and Palestinian literature, art, and cinema from the early 20th century to 2010. She is also a co-editor of 'Unsettling Jewish Knowledge' and has co-edited special issues on Jewish writing and world literature. Levy's ongoing projects include a biography of Esther Azhari Moyal, a Jewish woman writer from the 19th-century Nahda, and a project titled 'Global Haskalah,' which revises the Eurocentric narrative of Jewish modernity by highlighting transnational literary exchanges among Jewish languages in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her scholarship has been translated into Hebrew, Czech, and German. At Princeton, Levy teaches courses on Hebrew and Arabic literatures, Jewish culture, Middle Eastern Jewish history, world literature, and critical theory. She has also taught at Harvard University and the Yiddish Book Center. Her research has been supported by fellowships, including an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. Levy's work is characterized by a focus on issues of linguistic representation, literary multilingualism, and the politics of transnational and cross-cultural circulation, contesting the partitioning of religious thought from literary modernism.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Stranger Fictions: A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation Rebecca C. Johnson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021). Pp. 288. $47.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9781501753060

  International Journal Middle East Studies · 2023-02-01

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• Thinking with an Accent

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023 · 22 citations

  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy

  A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care.

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• CHAPTER 3 “You Just Can’t Compare” holocaust comparisons and discourses of Israel-Palestine

  Berghahn Books · 2022-09-20

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• Temporalities of Israel/Palestine: Culture and Politics

  Critical Inquiry · 2021-06-01 · 15 citations

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  This article charts a relational history of Palestinian and Israeli temporalities. Probing the interplay of political and cultural discourses, I show how while literature and film are indices of the temporal views that inform political action, they also work to expand those views. What are the key temporal concepts of Zionism and Palestinian thought, and how have they been negotiated in literary and cinematic works from the 1940s to the present? How have major political developments influenced temporal attitudes and cultural discourse? What emergent temporalities are at play in the current political climate? To address these questions, I bring insights from the social sciences into dialogue with close readings of Hebrew and Arabic works. After delineating what I call the syntagmatic model of Israeli and Palestinian temporalities, I discuss the fluid and nonlinear temporalities that are increasingly salient in Palestinian cultural production.

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• Family Affairs: Complicity, Betrayal, and the Family in Hisham Matar's <em>In the Country of Men</em> and Nadine Gordimer's <em>My Son's Story</em>

  CLCWeb Comparative Literature and Culture · 2019-06-04 · 3 citations

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  This essay undertakes a comparative reading of the dynamics of complicity and resistance in two contemporary Anglophone novels, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990) and Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2006). My analysis pursues three main lines of inquiry: the ostensible public/ private and political/ personal divides; loyalty and betrayal in the family; and the ambiguous status of the child as a witness and a political subject. I argue that in their respective portrayals of the protagonists’ struggles against South African apartheid and authoritarian rule in Libya, both authors use the device of the child narrator to expose the tension between the family and the political world, pointing to the fallacy of separating the political from the personal. The two novels depict complicity not as a problem of individual morality in a standoff against the state’s abuse of power, but rather as an issue that is deeply embedded in the psychology of family relations. As such, they lead us to evaluate both resistance and complicity through the lens of familial betrayal. Ultimately, Gordimer and Matar use the child narrator’s partial understanding to reconsider the ethics of complicity, yet the two authors diverge in their political conclusions.

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• Accent and Silence in Literary Multilingualism: On Postarabic Poetics

  2019-04-10 · 2 citations

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• Before Global Modernism: Comparing Renaissance, Reform, and Rewriting in the Global South

  Modernism/Modernity Print Plus · 2018-09-11

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  Fig. 1. Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore, July 14, 1930. Photograph by Martin Vos. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Where and when does the story of “global modernism” begin, and what is its relationship to translation? It is perhaps axiomatic that twentieth-century literary modernism outside the European metropole typically emerged under colonial, semi-colonial or

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• Sayed Kashua, native: dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian life

  Middle Eastern Literatures · 2017-09-02

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• A Non-Universal Global: On Jewish Writing and World Literature

  Prooftexts · 2017-01-01 · 11 citations

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  In our introduction to this special issue of <i>Prooftexts</i>, we continue our collaborative investigation of the multifacted relationship between Jewish literature and world literature, critiquing the dominant scholarly paradigms informing each of these two discourses. We argue that the decentered model of Jewish literatures exposes the limits of a world literature model defined through literary competition and exchange between nations, where "the world" is implicitly constructed from a majoritarian viewpoint. Here we characterize the relationship between Jewish literature and world literature in terms of the "nonuniversal global": our term for the paradoxical condition of a global diaspora that is at once cosmopolitan and marked by its minority status. We draw upon the eight essays included in the issue to interrogate the relationship between World Literature and Jewish culture by focusing on how different modern Jewish writers understood the significance of "the world" in the context of their literary practice. Adducing the work of our contributors, we demonstrate how modern Jewish writing in sites across the globe and in a range of economic and political systems emerged asking questions of its own world status and its tranlatability. With emphases on questions of (un)translatability, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora, the eight essays in this issue illuminate our arguments through their analyses of the multiple trajectories of Jewish cultural modernity.

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• Cynthia Kaplan Shamash: The Strangers We Became: Lessons in Exile from One of Iraq’s Last Jews

  Contemporary Jewry · 2016-04-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Emily Apter

  New York University

  72 shared

• Walter D. Mignolo

  72 shared

• Tejúmólá Ọláníyan

  Stanford University

  72 shared

• Vicente L. Rafael

  72 shared

• Kiran Mirchandani

  University of Toronto

  72 shared

• Rebecca L. Walkowitz

  72 shared

• Mara Mills

  New York University

  72 shared

• Allison Schachter

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Je…
• 2014 Salo Baron Prize from the American Academy of Jewish Re…
• 2015 MLA Prize for a First Book