Na'ama Rokem

Na'ama Rokem is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at the University of Chicago, serving as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University (2007) and has taught at UChicago since 2009. Her work focuses on Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature, with emphases on translation, multilingualism, and self-translation. She co-edits the Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works and leads projects on Jewish graphic narratives, multilingual literary networks, and the history of Chicago’s South Side through the Oak Woods Cemetery initiative, funded by NEH, Mellon, and the Women’s Board.

Her research explores how prose and translation shaped Zionist literary foundations, as detailed in her book Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature (2013). She investigates translingual correspondences between German and Hebrew writers, including Kafka, Arendt, Celan, and Amichai, to redefine Jewish literary modernity. Recent projects integrate urban history, pedagogy, and interdisciplinary collaborations across linguistics, creative writing, and race studies.

Rokem teaches courses on Jewish literature, poetry pedagogy, and multilingualism, co-developed the Poetry and the Human humanities core course, and advises graduate students across Comparative Literature, NELC, History, and Divinity. Her work bridges literary analysis with public engagement, using cemeteries as sites to explore African American and Jewish histories in Chicago.