Shai Ginsburg is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Israeli cultural studies in the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Jewish Studies, Middle East Studies Center, and Arts of the Moving Image.

His book Rhetoric and Nation: The Formation of Hebrew National Culture, 1880-1990 (Fall 2013) examines the intersection of literature, cultural criticism, and political writing in producing and forming a Hebrew discourse of a nation. Ginsburg has been writing on Israeli and American cinema, on Hebrew literature and on Israeli intellectual history and political culture. He also translated a collection of Paul de Man's essays for the first time into Hebrew.