Hannan Hever is the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature and Comparative Literature. Prior to his appointment at Yale University in 2013, Hannan Hever taught for many years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University and served as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States. Hever’s research encompasses various periods in the history of Hebrew literature, ranging from Hasidism and the Enlightenment to contemporary times. As both a historian and interpreter of Hebrew literature, Hever is recognized as a leading scholar in the political, post-national, and postcolonial analysis of Hebrew literary history.
Among his numerous publications, Hever’s book The Narrative and the Nation (2007) offers a new paradigm for the critical reading of the national canon of Hebrew literature. In To Inherit the Land, To Conquer the Space: The Birth of Hebrew Poetry of the 1940s (2016), Hever examines the emergence of Hebrew poetry in the Land of Israel through a postcolonial lens, critically analyzing the role of Hebrew literature within the broader national project of Jewish settlement.
Hever has also long been engaged in the study of literary representations of violence and their national significance. His book Suddenly the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry of the 1940s (2016) addresses the intersections of war, violence, and post-nationalism in Hebrew poetry related to the Holocaust and the War of Independence. Further studies on the War of Independence are presented in The Literature of 1948: Philology and Responsibility (2019), which interrogates questions of moral responsibility within the national literary corpus of that period.
In his most recent book, Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism: Chapters in Literary Politics (2023), Hever compares the national Zionist literature with the non-national literature of Hasidism, and literature of the Hebrew Enlightenment as well.
Building on his earlier work on two prominent Galician poets—Avraham Ben Yitzhak, a pioneer of modernist Hebrew poetry, and Uri Zvi Greenberg, a radical expressionist—Hever is currently engaged in writing a history of Hebrew literature in Galicia, framing it as a literary tradition that emerged within the Austro-Hungarian imperial context.