Oren Yirmiya

I am a scholar of modern Hebrew literature, with particular expertise in poetry from the 19th century to the present day. My research situates this literary corpus within the broader contexts of transhistorical Jewish literature, drawing connections to rabbinic literature of late antiquity and the liturgical tradition of piyyut, which emerged during the rabbinic period and continues to evolve today.

My work engages several interconnected themes: the relationship between personal and national agency in literary expression; the underexplored connections between lyric poetry and Hebrew liturgical forms; patterns of intertextuality across Jewish textual history; and the complex interplay between aesthetic judgment and political affiliation in modern Jewish thought. I am particularly interested in developing alternative frameworks for understanding Hebrew literature's traditional taxonomies of social groups, genres, and literary generations beyond historical necessities and into counterfactual pathways that can grant us new ways of imagining the future.

Recently, I completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I focused on non-binary Hebrew literature and trans studies. I am currently completing a book manuscript titled The Other('s) Lyric: Piyyut, Identity, and Alterity in Modern Hebrew Mizrahi Poetry, which examines how Mizrahi poets engage with liturgical traditions to articulate complex questions of identity, belonging, and cross-identitarian solidarity.