Dr. Shira Stav is a scholar of Hebrew literature, a poet, a translator, and a literary critic. She is senior lecturer in the department of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her research areas are Comparative literature and Modern Hebrew Literature. Stav is the author of Reconstructing Daddy: Fathers and Daughters in Modern Hebrew Poetry (2014, in Hebrew); The Return of the Absent Father: A New Reading of a chain of Stories from the Babylonian Talmud (2022, together with Haim Weiss; University of Pennsylvania Press); and many journal articles. She also edited three research anthologies. Stav has been a research fellow at Katz center for advanced Judaic studies in Philadelphia, Taube center at Stanford University and the Jewish Studies program at University of California, Santa Cruz.

In addition to her academic work, Stav translated and edited wide collections of poems by the praised American poets Sharon Olds (2017) and Ocean Vuong (2023). Since 2005 Stav is a regular contributor of book reviews to the literary supplement of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and won the 2009 Bernstein Prize for literary criticism. She published two collections of poetry: Lashon Itit (Slow Tongue) in 2012 and Shrir Halev (Muscle of the Heart) in 2019. She won the 2007 Teva Award for young Hebrew poets and the 2013 Bernstein Prize for poetry. Her poems have been translated into English, German, French and Arabic.