Yael Flusser is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, affiliated with the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. Her dissertation, Not Your Self-Translator: Voice, Identity, and the Limits of Liberal Justice, examines how contemporary writers working across the U.S., Israel/Palestine, and Mexico resist the frameworks of voice and self-translation often used to read their work. Bringing together literature in Hebrew, English, and Spanish with NGO archives and court transcripts, her research explores the ways affect, testimony, and recognition function within systems of marginalization, and how literature challenges the assumption that voice alone can bring about justice.
Her second project explores national affect and literary form in contemporary Hebrew literature, analyzing how emotional hierarchies shape what counts as knowledge and what gets ignored. Across both projects, she combines close reading with discourse analysis and cultural criticism to study how literature registers and intervenes in the moral economies of contemporary life.
Yael has taught undergraduate seminars at Columbia University and the University of Chicago on Hebrew literature, U.S. translingual literature, literature and the law, and language justice. She has also taught introductory and intermediate Modern Hebrew, as well as academic reading in Hebrew for research purposes. She is the recipient of the 2022 Dean’s Award for Graduate Student Teaching Excellence.