Dr. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi is a theatre researcher at the Department of Theatre Arts, Faculty of the Arts. She served as Chair of the department (2017-2021) and as the Academic and Artistic Director of the University Theatre (2016-2020). Her research focuses on the relations between ritual, religion and theatre in the late medieval and modern periods, and she also works on feminist theatre and Israeli theatre and performance. She is the author of Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), Gender and Feminism in Modern Theatre (Open University Academic Press 2013, Hebrew), and Biblical Theatre in Israel: Identity and Otherness (IDI 2016, Hebrew). She is the editor of Wanderers and Other Israeli Plays (Seagull Books 2009), and co-editor of Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury 2014) and together with Sefy Hendler of the the Catalogue of Table Manners, an Interdisciplinary Project at the University Art Gallery (2019).
In 2012 Sharon was chosen as a member of the Israel Young Academy, established by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In this context she served as a member of the Steering Committee and co-organized with Sibylle Baumbach from the German Young Academy two interdisciplinary symposia: ‘Big Data and the Future of Research in the Digital Age’ (Jerusalem 2015) and ‘Wo/Man, Mind, Machine’ (Berlin 2016).
Sharon holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her awards and grants include a Fulbright grant for doctoral studies, a Dan David post-doctoral award, a post-doctoral grant as member in a research team supported by GIF (German Israeli Foundation), a membership in a research group at the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University (2015-2016), and a research grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) 2017-2021 for the project "The Art of Adaptation: The Theatre of Rina Yerushalmi and the Itim Ensemble." Her work on "Video Annotation" as part of this research project was featured in the exhibition "Primary Sources: Activating the Archive" at the TAU University Gallery (2022).
Until 2016 Sharon was a senior lecturer at the Department of Comparative Literature at Bar-Ilan University. In 2013-2014 Sharon served as the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley, where she taught at TDPS (Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies) the following courses: "Representing the Shoah in the Theatre," "Modern Theatre and Religious Sources," "Gender and Identity in Jewish Drama," and "Contemporary Israeli Theatre." She also taught and lectured at the International Graduate Summer School of the Department of Theatre and Media Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany (2011; 2013; 2015).
