Michal Ben-Horin

Michal Ben-Horin received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Tel Aviv University and holds degrees in Comparative Literature and the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv. A Research Fellow in German-Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (2009/10), Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (2006), and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Haifa (2005). She received the Council for Higher Education Rotenstreich Scholarship (2002/3), Franz Rosenzweig Fellowship (2004), The Minerva Fellowship (2007), a Research Grant of the City of Vienna and the HUJI European Forum (2011), and a Research Grant of the Minerva Institute for German History at TAU (2013).

Michal taught at the University of Florida, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv University courses on German and Austrian literatures, Modern Jewish and Israeli Literature, critical theory, memory poetics, and gender. Since 2013 she teaches at Bar-Ilan University courses on Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, German Romanticism, theories of literature and music, and literature and testimony after the Holocaust. Head of the Department of Comparative Literature between 2017-2022.

She is the author of Musical Biographies - The Music of Memory in Post-1945 German Literature (De Gruyter, 2016), Reading the Voices – Musical Poetics between German and Hebrew (Bialik Institute, 2022), and co-editor with Galili Shahar of Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald between Literature and History (The Hebrew U Press, 2009). Among her articles and book chapters are: "Taboo, Disaster and Acoustic Reminders in Yehudit Hendel and Ruth Almog", Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (2019), "The Secular and its Dissonances in Modern Jewish Literature," Secularism in Question (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), "Perceptual Distortions in Böll, Bachmann and Celan," Seeing Perception (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), "Photography and Music in Ingeborg Bachmann and Monika Maron," German Life and Letters (2006), "Musik einer Erinnerungspoetik: Fallstudie über deutschsprachige und hebräische Literatur nach '45", Weimarer Beiträge  (2004).

Research:

German literature, literature and music, poetics of memory, Holocaust representation

My research includes explorations in the fields of Germanistik (German and Austrian literature since the eighteenth-century) and of Comparative and Modern Jewish Literatures. Its innovation lies in interdisciplinary and intertextual thought around different mediums of representation that confront the dilemmas inherent in verbal language. This research approach integrates literary and memory studies, musicological, aesthetic, and philosophical inquiry, post-structural and critical theory. My book "Musical Biographies" demonstrates how for authors such as Thomas Mann, G?nter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, music is not only tool of representation, but becomes a medium that powerfully attests to the dilemmas of handling traumatic experience.