April 17, 2023
Congratulations are in order: Dr. Yaron Shemer has received the 2023 Schwab Academic Excellence Award!
The award recognizes one faculty member from each College of Arts and Sciences department in the arts, humanities, and qualitative social sciences. Selected faculty, nominated by their department chairs, may use the awarded funds to support their scholarship and creative activity.
Dr. Shemer, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, is in the process of completing a new monograph, preliminarily entitled Witnessing, Steadfastness, and Agency: The National Cartoon Figures of the Israeli Srulik and the Palestinian Handhala, which digs deep into the lives, careers, and creations of two influential cartoonists in modern Israel and Palestine. This project follows naturally on his 2013 book, Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, a remarkable study that is ambitious in scope and analysis. Drawing on over one hundred Israeli films, his first book reveals the cinematic shape of Mizrahi ethnic identity. While attending to the formal vocabulary of narrative, character, and space in film, Dr. Shemer also reads filmic representation in terms of the larger context of Israeli culture and politics. Shemer’s new book evolves this approach and distinctive methodology and applies it to the particular mix of word and image found in comics, expanding his analysis of Israeli popular culture and clearly establishing him as one of the premier critics in his field. The Schwab Academic Excellence Award will help him to complete his writing and move the book into production.
So many congratulations, Dr. Shemer! We’re so proud of you!