In Conversation w/Rachel Harris: Beyond the Battlefield

In this episode, Dean Horswell chats with Rachel Harris about her recent research on the IDF archive and the early formation of Israeli film culture. Their conversation moves beyond the finished article to the process itself: what it means to actually undertake archival research, to work inside military and state archives, and to piece together a history from fragmentary, uneven, and sometimes resistant sources. They discuss the intellectual and methodological stakes of reading institutional archives critically, the challenges of access and interpretation, and how archival discoveries can reshape established narratives about cinema, nation-building, and cultural production. The episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how archival work happens—and why it matters.Rachel S. Harris occupies the Gimelstob Eminent Scholar Chair for Judaic Studies, and is a Professor of Film and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University where she also directs the Program in Jewish Studies. Prior to this, she was an Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature and The Program in Jewish Culture & Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2009-2022). She was also was the Shoshana Shrier Distinguished Visiting Professor at Toronto University. She is active in the Association for Jewish Studies where she served as the chair of the Women's Caucus (2017-2019) and the Association for Israel Studies where she served two terms on the board (2015-2019) and Chaired the 37th Association for Israel Studies Annual Conference "Pluralistic Israel: Women, Minorities and Diversity" in 2021. She has served on the committee for the Yonathan Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies (2019-2022) and as its chair (2021-2022).Harris is the author of Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (2017) and An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature (2014). She is the co-editor of Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema (2021) with Dan Chyutin which won The Janovics Center Best Book Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies, 2021. She edited Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2019), and with Ranen Omer-Sherman she edited Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (2012).She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Jewish Identities.