Raised by a Modernist and a Medievalist, in a home where the Norton Anthology was always open and coffee-stained, I asserted my independence by pursuing, first, a career as a concert pianist, and, later, by specializing in contemporary literature, critical theory, popular culture, and film. I was Professor of English and Film Media at the University of Rhode Island, USA (2000-2020) prior to joining the Hebrew University where I now hold the Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair in American Studies.

My first book, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (University of Virginia Press, 2006) is a critical intervention in the distinct fields of trauma theory, Holocaust studies, and comparative ethnic studies. I examine the form and function of language’s limits in representations of the catastrophic historic violence: the Holocaust, slavery in America, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To move the crucial work on comparative atrocities beyond the impasse of “unspeakability,” I offer a paradigm of aesthetic engagement defined by complicity in order underscore the mutual implications of diverse histories of suffering.

Disappear Here: Violence After Generation X explores a profound cultural change that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which developments in technology, media, and global politics revised long-standing cultural, philosophical, and ethical approaches to violence, to reality, and to the ever-elusive meaning of “real violence.” Generation X names a demographic that is now nearing middle age and assuming key positions in business, culture, and politics, but it also refers to a culture of disaffection that was quite widespread among young people whose experience with violence was colored by their ability to pause, rewind, and replay images.

I have also published volumes of edited essays that focus on "hip," "cult," or "underground" literature.

Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (Continuum, 2006), co-edited with Alain-Philippe Durand, examines the phenomenon of extremity: the centrality of images of violence and wounding in contemporary global culture.

Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park (2011), brings together scholars from the U.S., Canada, Denmark, the U.K., Spain, and Israel who contributed essays on this controversial novelist.