Professor Naomi Mandel was born in the United States and educated both at Tel Aviv University and the University of California-Irvine. She was Professor of English and Film/Media at the University of Rhode Island before joining the faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is Associate Professor of English and holds the Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair of American Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary literature and critical theory, with particular interests in the aesthetics and ethics of violence.

She is the author of Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (University of Virginia Press, 2006) and Disappear Here: Violence after Generation X (Ohio State UP, 2015), and has published three volumes of edited essays, including Bret Easton Ellis (Continuum, 2010) and Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (co-edited with Alain-Philippe Durand; Continuum, 2006). Her work on American Slavery, the Holocaust, and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Dialectical Anthropology, and boundary 2.