Research: Literary urban studies, cultural memory and nostalgia, literary theory, world literature

Chen Bar-Itzhak received her PhD from the Department of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford and a post-doctoral fellow at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the literary representations of cities and urban life, the ties between literature and cultural memory, and world literature studies. Her research won her the Nathan Rotenstreich fellowship, the Sami Michael prize for excellence in research, the Dr. Eli Reinhard post-doctoral fellowship from Stanford University and a grant from the World Union of Jewish Studies.  In 2021 she joined the Department of Comparative Literature at Bar-Ilan University.         

Her first book, "A Mixed Space: Haifa in the Israeli Literary Imagination" is forthcoming with the Ben Gurion Center for the Study of Israel and Zionism. With Vered K. Shemtov, she edited "Literary Multilingualism", a special issue for Stanford University's Dibur Literary Journal. Her published and forthcoming articles and book chapters touch on topics related to literary urban studies, the ties between language, space, memory and ideology, the contact zones between Hebrew and Arabic literatures, and theoretical aspects of world literature studies.

In addition, Dr. Bar-Itzhak is a board member of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) and an editor of Stanford University's peer-reviewed Dibur Literary Journal.