Yael Flusser teaches Hebrew language and literature at Columbia University. Her teaching draws on a background in comparative literature and research on Modern Hebrew in diasporic and translingual contexts. She has designed and led undergraduate seminars on Hebrew literature, 20th- and 21st-century US literature, academic writing, translingual fiction, and literature and the law.
She is a scholar of comparative literature whose research focuses on Hebrew and US literature in the twenty-first century. Her work examines how contemporary writers navigate language practices across Hebrew, English, and Spanish, tracing the intersections between literary form and political thought. She analyzes fiction and poetry as sites where liberal frameworks such as recognition, testimony, and voice are staged, tested, and sometimes transformed in relation to ongoing crises in Israel/Palestine and the US.
Her current research investigates the affective infrastructures that sustain violence and inequality in the present moment, examining how literature makes visible the mechanisms through which justice is promised yet deferred. Through close reading and attention to the circulation of texts across reception contexts, critical discourse, and extraliterary commentary, she traces how liberal democratic frameworks operate in contexts of state violence, structural racism, and displacement. Her work contributes to conversations in translingual literary studies, affect theory, and cultural criticism about the relationship between aesthetic practices and political possibility.
Yael earned her BA from Tel Aviv University and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching.