Education and Professional Background:

Irit Dekel teaches Introduction to sociology at ECLA in the winter term.

Dekel earned her PhD in sociology at the New School for Social Research. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem in 2008-10 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Humboldt Center for Political and Social Research, the department of Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin.  She studied political transformation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin in 2005-6 with the support of the DAAD research fellowship and in 2010-11 with a Fritz Thyssen foundation stipend. Her book Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in late 2012.

Her new research project will compare historic home museums in Germany and Israel and the ways the private sphere of home is turned public and experienced within the confines of the museum.

General Teaching Interests:

Sociological theory; cultural and political sociology; memory studies; museums and tourism; media

Research and Publications:

Peer reviewed journal articles:

Ways of Looking: Transcending Time and Space through Photography at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin. Memory Studies 2009 (2:1, 71-86).

"Pan-topia: Exposing the Palimpsest of Meanings at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin" History and Theory: The Protocols Bezalel Academy of Art and Design 14.

Book chapters

"Mediated Space, Mediated Memory: New Archives at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin" in Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg (eds.) 2011. On Media Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The Void Keeps Growing: Traumatic space in the Transformation of The Peace and Democracy Watch from Elite to an Enclave. 2012 (forthcoming) Davidovitch, Zalashik and Alberstein (Eds.) Trauma and Memory in Israel: Between Individual and Collective Experiences. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University