Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, BGU

01/06/2026

Every year, first-year students in “Introduction to Drama” (taught by Prof. Bar-Yosef) attend a theatrical production, trying to sense how dramatic works shift “from the page to the stage”. On Friday we attended Habima’s production of Ibsen’s A Doll House starring the (terrific) Shani Cohen, of Eretz Nehedert fame.

31/05/2026

The MA Program in Foreign Literatures in the Department of Foreign Literatures & Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev will offer a limited number of scholarships for literature students (with an average of 85 and above) who begin their studies (in the program’s thesis track) in October 2026. In order to be considered for these scholarships, candidates will have to complete their registration to the program by 30 June.
The MA track in Foreign Literatures, taught entirely in English, offers courses in Anglo-American and Comparative Literature from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches - including cultural studies, postcolonialism, q***r theory, historicism, Jewish studies, and cognitive poetics, among others. Applicants must have completed a BA in English or Comparative Literature by the beginning of the academic year. For more information see
https://www.bgu.ac.il/en/study/ma-english/catalog/categories/literary-studies-master/?tab=6182
Scholarships could range from stipends to smaller grants – all of which will be based on the students’ qualifications (and pending final budgetary approval).
The Foreign Literatures MA track at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev will hold an open day for candidates on Zoom on Monday, June 2, 17:00-18:00. The meeting will also include short talks with graduates and MA students from the department, who will talk about their experience of doing an MA and what they are doing today. link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83232392712?pwd=PFNtKtqUgx7WOP34aAGF0IeWoE5zYH.1
We will be happy to welcome you and tell you more about the program.
For further details please contact the head of the MA program in literature, Dr. Ruth Wenske-Stern [email protected] and/or Mrs. Hamutal Farkash, Departmental Administrator, at [email protected] or on the phone 08-6461128

MA in Linguistics and Literature

25/05/2026

The Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics is happy to invite you to our next seminar in literature, on Tuesday May 26th at 12:15-13:45, with Prof. Yael Levin from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on zoom. The title of the talk is “Obedience and the Possible: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926) and Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience (2023).”

Talk Synopsis:
Nearly one-hundred years after the publication of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman (1929), Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience (2023) returns to the theme of obedience as a method to consider a woman’s circumscribed life. Townsend Warner imagines a liberating obedience, Bernstein, a menacing obedience. Both foreground their protagonists’ independence and liberation in rather than outside its parameters. Such a conceptual reshuffling contributes to an undoing of the overdetermined discourse we use to address women’s action, independence, individuality and identity and offers a new way of testing the ideologically and morally divisive concepts of agency, care and individuality. This paper traces the history of the term, its relation to female identity and its meaningful articulations in the two novels to tease out the freedoms imagined within the experience of subjection.

Bio:
Yael Levin is associate professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and research fellow at the Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study in London. She is author of Joseph Conrad: Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2020), and is editor of the special issue of Poetics Today on literary attention (volume 47, 2026). Her articles on modernism, the subject and disability have appeared in journals of modernism and the history of ideas including Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Beckett Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Partial Answers, The Conradian and Conradiana.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86757953237?pwd=Ed7g9v4Kv30cVbhN5TaGtgxQaOT32t.1

24/05/2026

Congratulations to Ron Ben-Tovim, whose new novel "Avak" (in Hebrew) has been published by Pardes!

https://www.pardes.co.il/?id=showbook&catnum=978-965-541-583-4

12/05/2026

08/05/2026

The MA Program in Foreign Literatures in the Department of Foreign Literatures & Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev will offer a limited number of scholarships for literature students (with an average of 85 and above) who begin their studies (in the program’s thesis track) in October 2026. In order to be considered for these scholarships, candidates will have to complete their registration to the program by 30 June.

The MA track in Foreign Literatures, taught entirely in English, offers courses in Anglo-American and Comparative Literature from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches - including cultural studies, postcolonialism, q***r theory, historicism, Jewish studies, and cognitive poetics, among others. Applicants must have completed a BA in English or Comparative Literature by the beginning of the academic year. For more information see
https://www.bgu.ac.il/en/study/ma-english/catalog/categories/literary-studies-master/?tab=6182

Scholarships could range from stipends to smaller grants – all of which will be based on the students’ qualifications (and pending final budgetary approval).

The Foreign Literatures MA track at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev will hold an open day for candidates on Zoom on Tuesday, June 2, 17:00-18:00 at the following link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83232392712?pwd=PFNtKtqUgx7WOP34aAGF0IeWoE5zYH.1
We will be happy to welcome you and tell you more about the program.

For further details please contact the head of the MA program in literature, Dr. Ruth Wenske-Stern [email protected] and/or Mrs. Hamutal Farkash, Departmental Administrator, at [email protected] or on the phone 08-6461128

MA in Linguistics and Literature

29/04/2026

Congratulations to Eitan Bar Yosef, who has received the dean's excellent teacher prize: מצטייני ומצטיינות הדיקן בהוראה לשנת תשפ"ה
Eitan, we are proud of you!

28/04/2026

Congratulations to our students Adan Shekh Yosef and Omri Harpaz, who have received the dean's excellence award!

27/04/2026

You are warmly invited to the next seminar in literature at the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics – tomorrow, Tuesday, April 28th, at 12:15-13:45, with Dr. Sezen Ünlüönen from Tel Aviv University, on zoom. Link below.
The title of the talk is “ Halide Edib’s Memoirs and Ottoman/Turkish Racialization.”

Talk Synopsis:
In writing about Halide Edib’s relation to the Armenian Massacre, scholars argue that after the 1910s, Halide Edib gradually transformed from a “liberal, progressive intellectual” to a “denialist/nationalist.” Approaching this question more obliquely, this talk argues that Halide Edib’s Memoirs uses depictions of racial relations between the white and black subjects of the Ottoman Empire as an implicit apology for Halide Edib’s involvement with the Turkish nationalist project more broadly. As a result, the talk makes two related interventions. One, it complicates the existing accounts’ of Edib’s unrepentant denialism in the later years of her life by showing the ways in which Edib comes to explicitly regret her involvement. Second, most of the current scholarship on racialization in late Ottoman/early republican period Turkey treats racialization of ethno-religious minorities (Greeks, Jews, Armenians etc.) and black populations of the empire separately. This article shows one of the ways in which racialized thinking about blacks interacted with racialized thinking about Armenians in the project of modernity for the empire and the young Turkish Republic.

Bio:
Sezen Ünlüönen is a literary scholar who specializes in Anglo-Ottoman encounters in the 19th century. She is a lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s Department of English Literature and American Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s English department in 2022. Her book project investigates how Ottoman and Turkish literary sources used colonial India as a site of self-conceptualization in the face of Western imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Literature Compass, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, and has been supported by a Fung Global Fellowship at Princeton University, as well as by Villa I Tatti, the Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard.

Topic: Department Seminar with Sezen Ünlüönen
Time: Apr 28, 2026 12:15 PM Jerusalem
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85642032797?pwd=5B4ZUy3WZ8FyUE7DGTF8qvyk60CrK0.1