About

Lev Kenaan (Ph.D Yale University 1995) is professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. Her book, Pandora's Senses: The Feminine Character of the Ancient Text (Wisconsin, 2008) interprets the myth of the first woman and shows how femininity is embedded in masculine and canonical texts. Her book, The Ancient Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text (Oxford, 2019) examines the central role of the notion of classical antiquity for the foundation of psychoanalysis. The book offers new interpretations of the Freudian unconscious and its functioning within receptions studies and intertextuality.   

 

The study of culture and myths is central to Lev Kenaan’s writing that deals with the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, intertextuality and interpretation of dreams, textuality and gender. She is consistently active in bridging between myth, poetic thinking and contemporary methodologies in the Humanities. 

 

In the recent book that just came out (March 2025) Classics Transformed in Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian Reception, Lev kenaan and Patricia Rosenmeyer present an original vision for a new research field, one that speaks directly to the crisis of humanism we are experiencing today.

 

Lev Kenaan is the chief editor of the Journal Dappim: Research in Literary Studies and of a book series “Myth in the Humanities,” whose first publication is Lev Kenaan & Noga Weiss, eds., Childhood Memory and Forgetfulness: Readings in Odysseus’ Scar, Haifa University Press and Pardes, 2018.