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.