Carola Hilfrich is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and founder of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Originally from Germany, where she studied Literature and Philosophy at the Universities of Munich and Berlin, she conducted her doctoral research in German Literature and Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University. She has been a Fellow of the Hebrew University's Institute for Advanced Studies' research group on "Ethnography and Literature" in 2005, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Friedrich Schlegel School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2012. Since 2012, she is a founding member of the Hebrew University's I-CORE "Da'at Hamakom Center for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Jewish World."

In her work, she focuses on the poetics and politics of contact zone writing in the historical contexts of modernity and contemporaneity, as well as on questions of circulation and mediation. She is author of Living Script (in German, Fink: 2000), a book on theories of cultural representation in 18^th century Jewish German Thought, and co-editor of Between Cultures: Theory and Praxis of Cross-Cultural Dialogue (Niemeyer: 1997) and Fields of Belonging: Passages of Jewish Literatures (to be published in De Gruyter's Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts series in 2017). Her current research explores questions of place and movement in contemporary literatures, focusing on choreographies between the body, imagination, and the built environment.