Faculty
Oded Nir
Assistant Professor of Hebrew
Queens Hall, Room 345E
Phone: 718-997-5572
oded.nir@qc.cuny.edu
PhD, The Ohio State University, 2014
Research
Oded Nir’s research uses Marxist theory to understand how Israeli culture and society are related to the tensions of contemporary capitalism. His work engages the way in which cultural texts enable us to grasp social form, in ways unavailable through any other means. Oded’s current projects include a monograph on how contemporary Israeli film and TV try to imagine solutions to economic tensions; several co-edited volumes, on topics such as one on Palestine/Israel and the critique of capitalism, speculative fiction in the Middle East and North Africa, and materialist approaches to Israeli and Jewish culture. He is also developing another monograph project, on the instrumental role of 1970s Israeli culture—from visual art and architecture, to book publications and films—in transplanting consumer culture into Israel.
Editorial Work
Professor Nir is an Associate Editor for the peer-reviewed quarterly, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.
Teaching
Professor Nir’s teaches both introductory and advanced courses on Hebrew and Israeli literature and culture. Among these are Hebrew 150, an introduction to Hebrew literature in translation; Hebrew 356, a course on modern Hebrew literature; Hebrew 358, a course on contemporary Israeli TV and film; and Hebrew 190, on the representations of Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Israeli culture. Professor Nir’s teaching emphasize a multidisciplinary approach to the study of culture, highlighting the way in which cultural texts creatively think through social problems, providing perspectives and revealing secrets that remain invisible from non-artistic perspectives.
Selected Publications
Monographs:
- Israel as World Reduction: Space and Capital on the Israeli Screen (in preparation)
- Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction (SUNY Press, 2018)
Edited volumes:
- Co-editor, Peripheral Literatures and the History of Capitalism, Special issue of the journal Modern Fiction Studies 68.1 (2022)
- Co-editor, Marxist Perspectives on Palestine/Israel, a special issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism 30.3 (2018)
Peer-reviewed journal articles:
- “World Reduction in Contemporary Israeli Film and TV,” Jewish Film and New Media, 9.1 (2021)
- “A Short History of Zionist and Israeli Political Marxism,” Journal of Israeli History, 38.1 (2020)
- “Fauda and Crisis,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 18.1 (2019)
- “Utopian Tremors, or, the Enigmatic Restlessness of the Israeli Literary Soldier,” Criticism 60.3 (2018)