Milette Shamir

Milette Shamir is currently serving as Vice President of Tel Aviv University, in charge of international academic collaboration. As faculty member in the Department of English and American Studies, her research focuses on U.S. literature and culture in the nineteenth century. She is the author of Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Penn University Press, 2005) and the editor of Boys Don't Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the US (with Jennifer Travis, Columbia University Press, 2002). Her most recent edited collection, Bigger than Ben-Hur: The Novel, Its Adaptations, and their Audiences (with Barbara Ryan, Syracuse University Press, 2015), is an offshoot of her monograph on American Holy-Land Narratives and the modernization of U.S. cultural forms during the long nineteenth century. Her work appears regularly in journals and essay collections devoted to the study of American literature and cultural history.

Shamir earned her PhD from Brandeis University, where she worked with Michael T. Gilmore and Wai-Chee Dimock. She was a visiting scholar at Duke University, at the University of Texas, Austin, and at NYU. She served or is serving on several boards, including, from 2012 to 2015, on the editorial board of American Literature. Among the grants and scholarships she received are an ISF research grant and an Alon scholarship.

Shamir is the editor-in-chief of the journal Poetics Today (with Irene Tucker of UC Irvine). From 2015 to 2019 she served as Vice Dean of the Humanities for Academic Affairs. She co-founded TAU's American Studies program in 2006, and served as its head for thirteen years. She served as chair of the Department of English and American Studies from 2006 to 2009. In 2012 she founded TAU’s pioneering undergraduate program for international students--the BA in Liberal Arts—and served as its academic director until 2016.

She regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Antebellum American literature, American Realism and Naturalism, gender and sexuality, orientalism, transnationalism, and travel narratives. She was awarded prizes for teaching excellence by TAU’s rector and by the Dean of Humanities.