UC Berkeley’s Division of Arts & Humanities welcomes Roni Masel as of Jan. 1, 2023. Masel, an assistant professor in the campus’s Department of Comparative Literature, concentrates on Hebrew and Yiddish literatures.
Masel studies Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, particularly in the context of modern Jewish history and culture in Eastern Europe; the history of reading and the book; and queer and postcolonial theory. She is currently working on Bad Readers: Misreading, Mistranslation, and Other Textual Malpractices in Hebrew and Yiddish, a book manuscript that examines Jewish literatures in Eastern Europe and examines what it means when someone is referred to as a “bad reader.” Her latest project, “Yiddish Empires: Visions of Race and the Global in Modern Yiddish Culture,” examines the 20th-century globalization of Yiddish culture.
Masel received her doctorate from New York University. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she held positions as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at Ben-Gurion University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Currently, she is teaching an undergraduate course titled “Fantastic Beasts: The Supernatural, the Demonic, and the Magical in Literature."