Research: Ecocriticism, 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 interests include ecocriticism, literary urban studies, cultural memory studies, and world literature studies. Her work has been supported by 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" was published with the Ben Gurion Center for the Study of Israel. With Vered K. Shemtov, she edited "Literary Multilingualism", a special issue for Stanford University's Dibur Literary Journal. With Yotam Popliker, she edited "Jewish Ecologies", the first journal issue dedicated to developing ecocriticism in the study of Jewish literatures. Her published and forthcoming articles address ecofiction and climate fiction, literary urban studies, the ties between language, space, memory and ideology, the contact zones between Hebrew and Arabic literatures, and theoretical questions in 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.