Miryam Segal

Miryam Segal is associate professor at Queens College (History) and the Graduate Center (Middle Eastern Studies; Liberal Studies). In 2021-22 she will be visiting professor in Jewish Law at Harvard Law School. Prof. Segal earned her bachelor’s degree at Harvard College, her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a master’s degree from Yale Law School. Her doctorate is in Hebrew and Comparative Literature, but she has taught many different subject areas in a variety of departments, including religious studies, Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, modern Hebrew and Israeli culture, and gender studies. Her most recent teaching and research focuses on American legal history and the Anglo-American oath, and Jewish law.

Her first book, A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics Accent, focuses on the formation of the “new accent” in poetry and speech. She has completed a manuscript for a second book on the intertwined gender politics of Labor Zionism and of Hebrew poetry in early twentieth century Jewish Palestine (“Working Writers”). She has co-edited two volumes: Vixens Disturbing Vineyards: The Embarrassment of Scriptures, which examines the influence of narrative on community, and a forthcoming collected volume on Jewish family law. For the latter she wrote an article on the vow in biblical law and narrative, part of a larger project on neder in biblical and early rabbinic writing. Prof. Segal is a member of the Executive Board of the Jewish Law Association, and Co-Chair of the JLA’s publications committee.