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).
During her PhD studies, Hammer studied in the Disability Studies program at UC Berkeley as a Fulbright visiting research student (2010-2011). In her postdoctoral research, from 2013-2014, she was at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, and from 2014-2015, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Disability Studies program at UC Berkeley. During this time, she was also a scholar-in-residence with Axis Dance Company, where she conducted fieldwork with dancers with and without disabilities.
Participating in a warmup with actors during my fieldwork. Photo by Efrat Hen.
Hammer’s study of blind women’s everyday gender performance led to a deep interest in Disability Culture, and since 2014 Hammer has conducted an ethnography in Israel and the US with integrated dance companies bringing together dancers with and without disabilities, examining the ways new knowledge of the body, ability, and disability is expanded, translated and politically transformed among practitioners of integrated dance. This project was published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist, and a special issue on dance and disability she co-edited is forthcoming with the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.
Hammer’s current project, initiated in August 2019, examines the sensory practices and cross-sensory translation techniques of deaf, blind, and deaf-blind performers in an integrated theater.
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.