Interests and Research
Professor Michal Shapira joined the History Department at Tel Aviv University in 2013. She previously taught at Barnard College, Columbia University as an ACLS-Mellon New Faculty Fellow and at Amherst College as a Visiting Assistant Professor. She received her B.A. from Tel Aviv University and her Ph.D. in History and Gender Studies from Rutgers University.
Her research and publications deal with the legacies of World War Two and the history of psychology in Britain, Europe and beyond. She focuses on total war, gender, and the development of expert culture in the twentieth century.
Fellowships and Awards
She received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), the Safra Center for Ethics, Rutgers, Princeton, Tel Aviv and Cornell Universities and others. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, an Associate Scholar at Barnard College, and a Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University.
Publications
Shapira is the author of the book The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013; paperback 2015)
- Finalist for the Royal Historical Society, Whitfield Prize, 2013
- Finalist for the Gradiva Book Award, National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, 2014
- For reviews see, for example, American Historical Review and H-Net
Her new book is titled A Case of Female Homosexuality in Modern Vienna: Sigmund Freud and his Patient Margarethe Csonka (Routledge, 2023).
- Winner, Radomír Luža Prize, German Studies Association and The American Friends of the DÖW, 2024
- Chosen for the George L. Mosse Annual Lecture in the History of Gender and Sexuality, 2024
She is the recipient of the 2021 Prize for Best Article from the Society for the History of Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association, published in the journal History of Psychology.
Shapira published articles in leading journals such as Medical History Journal, History of Psychology, Gender & History, Modern Intellectual History, Twentieth Century British History, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly, Theory& Criticism, Psychoanalysis & History and more.
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For book reviews see Isis, Journal of Modern History, Journal of British Studies, Twentieth Century British History, Journal of Social History, H-Net, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis and more.
Teaching
She teaches courses on Modern Global History; Modern European History; Modern British History; History of Medicine and of Science, History of Psychology; History and Theory of Psychoanalysis; History of Trauma; War and Society (the Second World War era); Jewish History; History of Childhood; Intellectual History; Queer History and Theory; Art History and the History of Photography; History of Gender and Sexuality.
Recent Courses
History of Psychoanalysis and Psychology
History of Sexuality, 1700-Present
To Hell and Back: The History of Europe in the 20th Century, 1890-1989
Global History of the Second World War
History of Gender in the West, 1789-Present
Expository Writing for History Students
History of Childhood in Britain and Europe
Europe in the Age of Total War, 1900-1950
Britain and British Imperialism Since 1815
History of Medicine and Psychology in Britain and Europe
Other Media
Shapira has given talks on BBC Radio. She occasionally writes for Haaretz; see for example: this article, as well as this one and this one.
For information about the conference History and Psychoanalysis, see the link.
Shapira co-organized a reading group at the Tel Aviv LGBTQ Community Center. She was also a member of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
