Yael Dekel has written and published on various topics in Hebrew literature, focusing particularly on its connections to the ideology of war, nationalism, and the notion of silence in the making of the Israeli national subject. In 2020, at the Literary Laboratory at Ben-Gurion University, she launched Roman Mafteach: Distant Reading of the Hebrew Novel, a digital humanities project that aims to collect data on the Hebrew novel as a whole, combining traditional close reading with distant reading methods. In her recent project “Space and Time in the Hebrew Novel,” carried out in collaboration with Uri Roll, a professor in the Department of Desert Ecology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the authors map the locations in which novels are set from both global and national perspectives, create networks of these locations, and track temporal trends in the representation of these settings.
She is a translator and editor at Ra'av Press, Be’er Sheva. Her recent co-authored book, In the Wake of War: Readings in Palestinian and Israeli Literature (with Ariel Sheetrit), will be published by the Open University.
Selected publications:
Gilead Jacobson, Yael Dekel and Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky (2025) “From Readers to Data. Uncertainty in Computational Literary Citizen Science", Journal of Computational Literary Studies 4(1).
Yael Dekel and Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky (2021), “From Distant to Public Reading: The (Hebrew) Novel in the Eyes of Many", Magazén | International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities, 2:2, 225-251.
Yael Dekel (2020) “'A Report on Culture's Losses and Victories': on the Poetics of Canaanite War Fiction" Mikan: Journal of Israeli and Jewish Literature and Culture 20: 334-355 (Hebrew).
Yael Dekel and Eran Tzelgov (2020) “The Hope of Salman Masalha: Re-territorializing Hebrew". CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture Issue 22.1.
Yael Dekel (2018) "The Place, Makom, no-Place: Between Netivot and Tel-Aviv in Shimon Adaf's Panim Zeruve Hamah (Sunburnt Faces)", Shofar 36(3): 60-76.
Yael Dekel (2018) "'A World for Itself and for its Silences': Silence and the Nation in Yemey Ziklag", Hebrew Studies 59: 201-228.