About

Gili Hammer is a cultural anthropologist working in the fields of disability studies, gender studies, anthropology of the body, sensory studies, and performance studies. She grew up in a Moshav (cooperative village) in the north of Israel and has spent most of her adult life in the intercultural city of Jerusalem. As a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she teaches courses on the sociology of disability, anthropology of the senses, ethnographic research methods, and visual culture. 

Hammer’s doctoral research (completed in 2014) focused on the social constructions of gender and femininity among blind women, and on the cultural construction of blindness and sight in the Israeli public sphere. This project was published in journal articles, book chapters, and in her book Blindness Through the Looking Glass: The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory Body (2019, University of Michigan Press).

Hammer’s study of blind women’s everyday gender performance sparked a deep interest in Disability Culture. Since 2014, she has conducted ethnographic research in Israel and the United States with disability dance and theatre companies that bring together performers with and without disabilities. Her work examines how new understandings of the body, ability, and disability are expanded, translated, and politically transformed among practitioners with diverse embodied experiences.

This research has been published in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist, and Etnofoor, and in a forthcoming special issue on dance and disability that she co-edited for the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.

Participating in a warmup with actors during my fieldwork. Photo by Efrat Hen.

Hammer’s current project, initiated in 2019, explores intersensory practices, encounters, and exchanges in blind-deaf theatres and art education programs, focusing on cross-sensory translation techniques among blind, Deaf, deafblind, hearing, and sighted individuals.

Beginning in October 2025, she will lead a new four-year project funded by the Israel Science Foundation: Disability Utopias in the Global Easts: Negotiating Sensory Diversity through the Performing Arts in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. This study will investigate dance and theatre companies composed of performers and creators with a wide range of sensory abilities and ways of knowing. Through fieldwork and collaborations across these regions, the project will examine the embodied, aesthetic, material, and social conditions that make disability utopias possible in an ableist world.

Hammer co-leads the Forum for Performance Studies and the Forum for Qualitative Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Disability (under contract with Oxford University Press).

An anthropologist at heart, Hammer loves traveling. In addition to residencies in the US, Hammer visited India twice for extended periods, and has also been to Nepal and traveled across Europe. She finds humans and human culture the most interesting of all possible subjects of study, and ethnography the most intimate means of documenting the human experience, allowing us to listen, learn, and imagine new realities and ways of life. Her studies serve as a bridge that challenges silencing, division, and all forms of simplification.