We are pleased to announce that the conference keynote speech will be given by Professor Zohar Shavit

At Tel Aviv University Prof. Shavit founded the academic study of the child's culture and the study of texts written for Jewish children in the German-speaking world. She has authored pioneering studies on the establishment of the institutions of Hebrew culture and Hebrew literature in Europe and Eretz-Israel. She has also studied the process of the construction of a national past and of national-cultural identities, as well as issues of cross-cultural interactions and the creation of a cultural repertoire and its function in the formation and the dissemination of a modern Weltanschauung.

Over the past 15 years Prof. Shavit has been conducting several comprehensive research projects in collaboration with scholars from Israel, Germany and France. Several of these projects have already been completed, among them: The Construction of Hebrew Culture in Eretz Israel; Books for Jewish Children in the German-speaking countries; German Historical Consciousness and Texts for Children; and Kinder- und Jugendliteratur im Prozeß der Modernisierung. She is currently completing a research project on Jewish Childhood in Germany under the Third Reich, 1933-1941, and has just completed a research project (with Prof. Gideon Toury) on Programming Cultural Contacts. The Functions and Politics of Intercultural Contacts. Case Study: Translation of Israeli Literature into French. Together with Professors Shmuel Feiner and Christoph Schulte she is currently conducting a comprehensive research project on The Library of the Haskalah 1755-1812: The Creation of a Modern Book Culture in German Jewry. To date, these research projects have been variously supported by grants from the von Humboldt Foundation, DAAD, GIF (four times), Thyssen Foundation (twice), Berthelsmann Foundation and the ISF (twice) in an aggregate amount of more than 2.5 million dollars.

Prof. Shavit has written and edited more than ten books in Hebrew, English and German, including the following: a standard work on children’s literature, Poetics of Children’s Literature. University of Georgia Press, Athens and London, 1986; Just Childhood. Introduction to Poetics of Children’s Literature. Am Oved and the Open University, Tel Aviv, 1996,(in Hebrew); a pioneering work on the creation of Hebrew culture in Eretz-Israel, The Construction of Hebrew Culture in the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel. The Israel Academy of Sciences and the Bialik Institute, Jerusalem, 1998, (in Hebrew); a pioneering work, written in collaboration with Hans-Heino Ewers, Ran HaCohen and Annegret Völpel, on books for Jewish children in German-speaking countries, Deutsch-jüdische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Von der Haskalah bis 1945. Die deutsch- und hebräischsprachigen Schriften des deutschsprachigen Raums. Ein bibliographisches Handbuch. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart, 1996, (in German); and a study of the construction of the image of the past in German books for children, A Past without Shadow, Ofakim, Am Oved: Tel Aviv, 1999, (in Hebrew). Recently, she published with Annegret Völpel the first comprehensive description of the cultural history of books for Jewish children in the German-speaking world, Deutsch-Jüdisch Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Ein literaturgeschichtlicher Grundriß. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart and Weimar, 2002, (in German). In January 2004 her book Poetics of Children's Literature was published in Portuguese, and in January 2005 an expanded version of A Past without Shadows was published by Routledge. Between 1998 and 2004 she was the principle researcher of the annual reports prepared by Pilat Research Institute for the Israeli Ministry of Culture on the activities of the state-subsidized cultural institutions.

She has published over seventy refereed articles in more than ten languages, and has actively participated, often as keynote speaker, in dozens of national and international conferences, receiving numerous national and international awards, grants and prizes for her work.          

Professor Shavit has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, at Northwestern University, at Léon University and at the University of Paris 8. She has been a guest lecturer and has presented research seminars at the Universities of Heidelberg, Sorbonne, Köln, Bonn, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Leuven, Paderborn, Helsinki, Giessen, Brandeis, Chicago, Northwestern, Stockholm, Uppsala, Gothenburg, Lund, Umeå, Vienna, Copenhagen, Linköping, Surrey Roehampton, Salzburg, Naples and Vigo.

At Tel Aviv university she has set up the program for "The Child culture and education", and  has served as vice chairperson of the department of Poetics and Comparative Literature, as vice director of the Institute for German History, as an acting chairperson of the Unit for Culture Research and as a member of the Appointments Committee of the School of Cultural Studies. She currently chairs the Finance Committee of the school cultural Studies as well as the Research Committee, Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University and is responsible for Research and Development at the Faculty of Humanities. In addition, she is a member of the Tel Aviv University Research Authority Council, member of the elected Senate of Tel Aviv University and a representative of the Senate to the University's Board of Directors, a member of the Board of Directors of the Leo Baeck Institute, a member of the editorial board of Kesher, a member of the editorial board of Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and a member of the Research and Publications Committee of the Leo Baeck Institute.

Prof. Shavit has also translated several children’s books, including E. B. White's Charlotte’s Web, for which she received the Hans Christian Andersen Certificate of Honor for distinguished translations.

She has been a member of several prize committees (Zeev’s, ACUM’s, First-Publication, Translators’, Galaz’, Bialik and Sokolow’s prizes) as well as of committees dealing with various areas of Israeli culture and has chaired the Vision 2000 committee of the Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport, which drafted and presented the cultural program of the Ministry, entitled: Culture Charter - Vision 2000, Cultural Policy for the State of Israel in the 21^st Century: Consensus Statement. She also chaired the follow-up committee, which supervised and coordinated the work of the committees appointed by the Minister and served as a cultural affairs advisor to the Minister of Science, Culture and Sport, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Second Television and Radio Authority, and as a member of the new Council for Arts and Culture. She currently serves as a member of the 18^th  City Council of the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality and as cultural Affairs advisor to the Mayor, and as a member of the Boards of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts.

Prof. Shavit is married to writer and historian Prof. Yaacov Shavit. She has three children (Noga, Uriya and Avner) and two grandchildren (Yonathan and Nimrod).