ITAY MARIENBERG-MILIKOWSKY
Senior Academic
Dr. Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky
A Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Literature, Itay is the founder and head of the BGU Literary Lab, as well as the co-founder and co-head of the BGU Environmental Humanities Centre. Itay's research interests are diverse, ranging from the historical poetics of Talmudic narrative, through computational literary studies and digital humanities, to classical narratology and ecocriticism. To date, he has published two books—We Know Not What has Become of Him: Literature and Meaning in Talmudic Aggada (Bar-Ilan University Press, 2016); Words to Count: First Steps in Computational Literary Studies (The Open University of Israel Press, 2022)—along with numerous articles across all his areas of expertise.
The BGU Literary Lab
When Itay arrived at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (October 2019) - following three years of postdoctoral research at the University of Hamburg, Germany (where he specialized in narratology, and especially computational narratology) - he established the BGU Literary Lab: A hub for computational research in Hebrew literature, first of its kind in Israel. The Lab reflects a disciplinary commitment to the tradition of studying Hebrew literature and literary theory, characterized by a dynamic interplay between computational and non-computational approaches. Its members—graduate students, research assistants, and postdoctoral fellows—work on numerous research projects. They collaborate with similar labs and parallel research centers worldwide, all while benefiting from a unique intellectual and social framework.
