Dennis Sobolev
literary scholar
Dennis Sobolev - literary scholar and writer, Associate Professor at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and the B.A. Honors Program at the University of Haifa. His academic interests include cultural theory, philosophical approaches to literature, Victorian and Modernist poetry, religious literature and multiculturalism.
Born in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) in 1971, Sobolev received his Ph.D. in English literature and literary theory from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1999. He is the author of six books, numerous poems and short stories, as well as almost fifty articles on literature and culture, which have been published in eight countries. Over the course of the last fifteen years, he has taught twenty different courses on literature and cultural theory; in 2005 and 2010, he received the 'Excellence in Teaching' awards. He is the author of the novel Jerusalem (shortlisted for the 2006 Russian Booker Prize) and the book Res Judaica, which analyzes a wide spectrum of cultural encounters between Christian and Jewish civilizations (2007). His most recent study - The Concepts Used to Analyze ‘Culture’: A Critique of Twentieth-Century Ways of Thinking (2010) - is devoted to the clarification and analysis of the concepts of the
individual and culture, as they have gradually appeared from the development of literary criticism, theoretical historiography, anthropology, semiotics, ideological criticism, and cultural studies over the course of the twentieth century. His next books - The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology and The Book of Tales - are forthcoming.
