Milette Shamir is associate professor in the department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University.  Her research focuses on U.S. literature and culture in the nineteenth century.  She is the author of Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Penn University Press, 2005) and the editor of Boys Don't Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the US (with Jennifer Travis, Columbia University Press, 2002). Her most recent edited collection, Bigger than Ben-Hur: The Novel, Its Adaptations, and their Audiences (with Barbara Ryan, Syracuse University Press, 2015), is an offshoot of her monograph on American Holy-Land Narratives and the modernization of U.S. cultural forms during the long nineteenth century.  Her work appears regularly in journals and essay collections devoted to the study of American literature and cultural history.

Professor Shamir earned her PhD from Brandeis University.  She was a visiting scholar at Duke University, at the University of Texas, Austin, and at NYU. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal Poetics Today (with Irene Tucker). She co-founded TAU's American Studies program in 2006, and served as its head for thirteen years. She also served as chair of the Department of English and American Studies from 2006 to 2009 and as Vice Dean of the Humanities from 2015-2019.  In 2012 she founded TAU’s pioneering undergraduate program for international students--the BA in Liberal Arts—and served as its academic director until 2016.  From the Fall of 2020 she is TAU's Vice President for International Affairs.