Naama Harel specializes in Modern Hebrew literature, Modern Jewish literature, and Israeli culture, as well as Human-Animal Studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanism. She holds a PhD in Hebrew and Comparative Literature from the University of Haifa, and she is the co-chair of Columbia Seminar of Human-Animal Studies. Her book Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human/Animal Barrier (University of Michigan Press, 2020) explores the constitution of a humanimal space in the oeuvre of Franz Kafka, which radically undermines the contradistinction between humanity and animality, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. In her book The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast: Gender and Animality in Modernist Hebrew Fiction (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming in 2025) the trope of the effeminate Jew is analyzed vis-à-vis the topos of the animalized woman, offering new Hebrew literary historiography and innovative perspectives on canonical works by Agnon, Baron, Berdichevsky, Brenner, Gnessin, and Vogel. Her current book project, Narrative of Slaughter in Jewish Literature, revisits fin-the-siècle Hebrew and Yiddish literary representations of animal slaughter through close reading, interdiscursive analysis, and critical examination of religious conceptions and socio-historical conditions.