Mazalit Haim

Assistant Professor of the Practice of Jewish Studies

Mazalit Haim is an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Hebrew Language Instruction at Vanderbilt University, where she directs the Hebrew Studies program and teaches Hebrew language, Israeli culture, and literature. Her research focuses on affect studies, modern Hebrew literature, and Jewish cultural production. She is currently working on a book project that examines the manifestations of hope and despair in Israeli culture and literature through the lens of affect theory. This project explores how the emotional underpinnings of Israeli literary and artistic works challenge and reframe Jewish and Zionist notions of hope and despair.

Professor Haim publishes on visual art, affect studies, psychoanalysis, and Jewish studies. Her scholarship includes work on the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, analyzing her method of pre-enactment through the lens of psychoanalysis and affect theory, as well as on the Jewish American author Shalom Auslander, engaging with his writing through the work of British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. She has also written on the Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg’s plays, tracing her transition from lyrical poetry informed by Russian symbolism to drama shaped by realism.

Her broader research interests encompass language pedagogy, curatorial and museum studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, the theory of the lyric, performance studies, and queer theory.