Professional Background
Yael Hacohen is a literary scholar specializing in Holocaust literature and contemporary women’s war poetry. Her work examines lyric testimony, material uncertainty, and the ways marginalized voices reshape the boundaries of war writing. Dr. Hacohen earned a PhD in rhetoric from the University of California Berkeley and teaches creative writing and literature at Tel Aviv University. Her scholarship focuses on poetic responses to war, memory, and structural violence, with particular attention to feminist and intersectional traditions.
Dr. Hacohen’s research explores last poems written during the Holocaust as fragile literary artifacts shaped by conditions of scarcity, danger, and imminent loss. Drawing on archives across Israel, Europe, Australia, and the United States, she analyzes these texts as both literary works and material objects, emphasizing how their physical form, transmission, and survival shape their meaning. She is also completing a book project tracing a lineage of contemporary American women’s war poetry from Muriel Rukeyser through Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Joy Harjo, arguing that these poets redefine war as structural, ecological, and embodied violence rather than battlefield combat.
In addition to her scholarly work, Hacohen is a poet. Her collection, The Dove That Didn’t Return, explores memory, displacement, and inheritance, and reflects her broader interest in lyric voice as a form of historical witnessing. Her interdisciplinary work bridges literary criticism, poetics, and testimony studies, bringing close reading into dialogue with archival research and theories of memory, voice, and representation.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Matthew Family Fellow, Yael Hacohen will conduct research on last poems written during the Holocaust, with a particular focus on children’s poetic testimony and fragile lyric texts composed under conditions of extreme precarity. Dr. Hacohen plans to use the Museum’s archival holdings, rare manuscripts, and survivor collections to examine handwritten poems, illustrated texts, and ephemera created in ghettos, camps, and hiding places. Her research investigates how material constraints, uncertainty of survival, and fractured transmission shape both the form and address of these poems, and how young writers used lyric expression to assert voice, witness violence, and imagine futurity in the face of annihilation.
Residency Period: June 1, 2027 – August 31, 2027