Re’ee Hagay

Overview

Re’ee Hagay is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and a Global Racial Justice graduate fellow in the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. His research develops a theoretical framework of sonofragmentation that ties together epistemological concerns to fragmentary documentary materials across historical contexts and media in the region. Focusing on the border aesthetic of Mizrahi Jews in Israel/Palestine, he suggests that sonofragmentation allows us to trace the deracializing potentiality found in the fragmentary quality of ostensibly disparate yet surprisingly related materials, such as a contemporary Mizrahi film archive and the medieval Jewish documents of the Cairo Geniza. 

Committee members: Jonathan Aaron Boyarin (Chair), Seema Golestaneh, Alejandro Madrid-Gonzalez, Ella Shohat

Research Focus

• Judaism in the Global South
• Poetics of exile
• Walter Benjamin
• Time and temporality
• Secularism

Publications

• Hagay, Re’ee. 2022. “Mourners are the Soundtrack of Life: Mourning, Time, and Aesthetic Geographies of the South in a Mizrahi Singer's Antibiography.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 63-76.
• Hagay, Re’ee; Boyarin, Jonathan. 2022. “Jewish Diaspora.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies. Ed. Naomi Seidman. New York: Oxford University Press.