Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor, Comparative Literature Department, UC Berkeley; Assistant Professor, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Yael Segalovitz is the 2026–2027 Helen Diller Institute Visiting Professor in the Comparative Literature Department and the Center for Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley in 2018, where she was a Townsend Center Fellow and a Posen Fellow.
Her research and teaching span comparative modernisms, theories of reading and translation, psychoanalysis and literature, and transnational literary exchange, with particular focus on Hebrew, Anglophone, and Brazilian/Portuguese contexts. Her book, How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY, 2024), traces the global circulation of close reading beyond the Anglophone world and its influence on modernist literary production. Her articles and essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Poetics Today, Textual Practice, Arizona Quarterly, symplokē, MLN, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Currently, she works on two projects: one on sleep and insomnia in Hebrew literature, and another exploring the resurgence of psychoanalytic object relations theories in the American humanities.
Segalovitz is also a literary translator. Her translations include Clarice Lispector’s The Via Crucis of the Body into Hebrew and Shimon Adaf’s Aviva-No into English, which was selected as an Editor’s Pick by World Literature Today (Winter 2020). At Berkeley, she organized the Townsend Center symposium “Close, Distant, Embodied, Artificial: Modes of Reading Today” (2026), and has served as curator of the Helen Diller Literary Series since 2024, continuing in that role through the 2026–2027 academic year. She currently co-hosts the second season of the podcast Psychoanaliterature, funded by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA), with psychoanalyst and writer Emma Lieber. The podcast features conversations with leading scholars and writers at the intersection of psychoanalysis and literature, including Maggie Nelson, Judith Butler, and Jane Gallop.
Courses:
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Sleep With Me: Literature, Rest, and the Politics of Wakefulness
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What the Self: Psychoanalysis, Autotheory, and Jewish Modernity
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Introduction to Modern Hebrew Literature
