Dr. Nir Evron

I work primarily on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature and culture, with forays into European contexts. My first book, The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds (2020) is a literary history of the emergence and dissemination of the trope of cultural extinction—the terminal ending of a collective form of life—in European, American and Hebrew literatures.

My current book project (supported by an ISF grant) explores the emergence and consolidation of the "animal story" as a distinct genre in postbellum American periodicals and the subsequent burst of animal fiction in turn-of-the-century fiction.

I am co-editor, together with Roi Tartakovsky, of a special issue titled The AI Revolution: Speculations on Authorship, Pedagogy, and the Future of the Profession (Poetics Today, June 2024), which brings together prominent literary scholars and theorists to muse together about the future of humanist learning and teaching in the age of Large Language Models.

I regularly teach courses on American literature, literary theory, animal studies, regionalist and frontier fiction.

Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Stanford University (2012).

Undergraduate, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005).

Books:

The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds. State University of New York Press (2020).

         Reviewed by:

• Jeremy Hawthorn, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas (2023), 21, Number 2.
• Brad Evans, Edith Wharton Review (2023) 39, no. 1.
• Katie Trumpener, Poetics Today (2024), 45 (1).

Edited:

The AI-Revolution: Speculations on Authorship, Pedagogy and the Future of the Profession, Special issue, coedited with Roi Tartakovsky, Poetics Today, Vol 45 no. 2 (June 2024)

Articles and Book Chapters:

“Realism, Irony and Morality in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.” Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 35.2, Winter 2012. pp. 37-51.

“Against Philosophy: Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous as Therapeutic Literature,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume 14.1, Winter 2016.

“Edith Wharton in Tel Aviv: The Curious Case of Undine Spragg.” Edith Wharton Review. Volume 33.1 Spring 2017.

“‘Interested in Big Things, and Happy in Small Ways’: Curiosity in Edith Wharton.” Twentieth-Century Literature Volume 64.1, Spring 2018. pp. 79-100.

“Foreign Means to Local Ends: Bialik, Emerson and the Uses of America in 1920s Palestine” Journal of Transnational American Studies Volume 9.1, 2018.

“Tribal Liberalism” Mafteach: Lexical Review of Political Thought Volume 3, 2019.  

“’Fog-shaped Men’: The Remnant-figure in American Regionalism,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, Volume 52.3, Winter 2019.

“On Finding the Mortal World Enough: Extinction, Value and the Crisis of the Humanities,” Contemporary Pragmatism, Volume 17: Issue 1, 2020, pp. 48-69.

Response to: “Isn’t That French?”: Edith Wharton Revisits the [International Theme’” by Virginia Ricard. Edith Wharton Review, Volume 36, Issue 2 August 2020.

“Hannah Arendt, Thinking, Metaphor,” Telos, Issue 196 Fall 2021, pp. 9-30.

“’Totally Vanished… Like a Pinch of Dust’: Edith Wharton and the Theme of Cultural Extinction” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Edith Wharton, ed. Emily J. Orlando, (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), pp. 209-22.

“Herder on Shakespeare, Nominalism and Obsolescence,” Dibur, Issue 12-3 (2022).

“LLMs and the Amazing Shrinking University,” Poetics Today 45:2 (June 2024).

“Introduction: The AI-Revolution: Speculations on Authorship, Pedagogy and the Future of the Profession,” Poetics Today 45:2 (June 2024).

“This Hyeh Is a Mighty Cruel Country”: Owen Wister’s The Virginian, the Western Genre, and the Question of Animal Cruelty.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture (forthcoming 2024).

Ph.D.

Ronnie Guy, “Between Fact and Fiction: Autofictive Revision of Life Stories and the Resistance of Representationalism in the Works of Elizabeth Gertrude Stein, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth and Phillip Roth”

Iyad Ma’aluf, “Monsters Among Us: A Cross-Cultural Philological Study of Othering”

MA:

Liz Altshuler, “From Suspicion to Solidarity: Affective Readings in Black American Female Narratives”

Ronit Mazovskiy, “The Lighthouse Keeper Goes to Town: The Individual and Culture in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Between the Acts” (completed 2019)

Ye’ela Karni, “Final Report on “’Nothing of All This is Left’: The Elegiac Fictions of William Maxwell” (completed 2018)