Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies, Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern studies south Asian studies and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University New York.
Professor Hochberg’s research focuses on the relationship between politics and aesthetics. With a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (UC Berkeley 2002) her early work was primarily about literature.Her later work shifted to visual arts, primarily cinema, video art, photography and painting. Her main interest centers on questions of representation and power, particularly in the context of colonialism, orientalism, and nationalism, with a concentration on Palestine, Israel, Zionism as well as a broader interest in (pos)tcolonial South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
She has published numerous essays about Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, Hebrew literature, Palestinian and Israeli cinema, postcolonial cinema, queer studies, photography, colonial oppression and legacies of resistance across gender, race and sexual minorities.
She is the writer of four single authored books. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures and cultural imagination. Her second book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian terrain and the emergence of a “conflict” or the sight of a conflict. Her third book, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke University Press, 2021), invites readers to learn how to use archives as a break from history, rather than as history’s repository. The book presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive’s liberatory potential in the context of a Palestine in becoming. Her most recent book (forthcoming) My Father the Messiah: a Queer Family Archive (Duke University Press 2026) is a creative nonfiction text about messianism, mental illness, religion, queerness, Judaism and the relationship between these all. In addition Hochberg has written for several gallery catalogues, has edited and co-edited special volumes on photography, and published numerous shorter essays both academic and creative nonfiction.