Mark Gelber

Mark Gelber (Ph.D. Yale Univ.) is Professor Emeritus with Active Researcher Status. He was elected department chair twice. He served as Director of the Center for Austrian and German Studies at BGU for ten years. He was appointed Dean of International Academic Relations; he established the German-language International Summer University in Hebrew, Jewish Studies and Israel Studies and directed it for a decade. He has been a guest professor in Graz, Aachen, Antwerp, Philadelphia (UPenn), New Haven (Yale), New York (NYU), Maribor, Beijing (Renmin Univ.), Guangzhou (Sun Yat-sen Univ.), and a guest researcher in Tübingen, Berlin (Freie Universität), Auckland, Frankfurt/Oder and at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies, Berlin/Brandenburg. He was appointed twice to serve as a judge for the Israeli prize in literature.

He has given 275 lectures and seminars internationally, written, edited, and co-edited 22 books, and authored some 100 scholarly essays, focusing on German-language Jewish writers, for example: Heine, Börne, Franzos, Kafka, Brod, Herzl, Nordau, Buber, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Elias Canetti, Nelly Sachs, Jakov Lind, Rose Ausländer, Ruth Klüger, and others. He has also published on Thomas Mann, Gustav Freytag, T.S. Eliot, Elie Wiesel, Erica Jong, and others. In 2001 he was elected to membership in the German Academy of Language and Literature (Darmstadt) and he received the Honorary Medal for Science and Art, First Class, from the Republic of Austria in 2018. A Festschrift in his honor was presented in 2018: “Wegweiser und Grenzgänger. Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte“ (Böhlau).