Doctoral Student Fellow
Doctoral Student, Department of French, Graduate School of Arts & Science
Raphael is currently Assistant professor of French at Amherst College. His research interests include late nineteenth and twentieth century literature and poetry, theories of reading, ethnology and magic. Focusing on the oeuvre of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) his dissertation proposes to question the relationship between legibility, visibility and interpretation and theorizes a ‘closed text’ that paralyzes the reader’s ability to interpret. Raphael has worked as a lecturer in Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He curated his first exhibition “Radical Jewish Culture, Musical Scene NY” at the Jewish Museums in Paris and Berlin and is currently working on “The Book as Body,” to be shown at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in 2015. He has published articles about Walter Benjamin and Gherasim Luca and is currently preparing the catalog for “The Book as Body” exhibition. Raphael joins the Humanities Initiative as an honorary fellow. He is the recipient of a 2014-2015 GSAS Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship.