I’m Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and hold a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. My articles and translations have appeared in Comparative Literature, English Literary History, Jewish Social Studies, Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Callaloo, Cambridge Literary Review, Guernica, and in various anthologies.

My first book, The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2011. My second book, Oedipus in Kishinev: Zionism, Tragedy, Text was published in Hebrew (Oedipus be’kishinev: Zionut, sifrut, tragedia) in 2014 by Bialik Institute Press. My current project, a memoir of my father’s forced migration from Poland to Iran during WW2, is entitled Tehran Children, and is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2019.

I have also written articles about neurodiversity and literary character, responses to collective trauma, and representations of heroism, guilt, and political action in literature.

You can reach me at mikhaldekel@gmail.com

Here is my Curriculum Vitae