Dr. Nana Ariel

Nana Ariel researches and teaches rhetoric, literature, and learning at the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University. She was previously a researcher and visiting lecturer at Harvard University and at Sciences Po in Paris, and a fellow of the Minducate Center for Learning Sciences. She teaches rhetoric from antiquity to modernity, and her research interests include the rhetoric of modernist and contemporary collective movements, conventionality and clichés in language, the material culture of books, and the relationship between speech and learning, as well as between theory and practice in pedagogy. Her recent book, Clichés We Live By: From Modernity to AI, co-authored with Dana Riesenfeld, was published by Oxford University Press in 2026. Her articles on pedagogy have appeared in journals such as Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Education and Information Technologies, and Culture, Theory and Critique. 
Nana created the official local academic version of the MOOC “Learn How to Learn,” which is taught at academic and other educational institutions across the country. Among her digital projects, she developed the Guide to argument fallacies together with rhetoric students from Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Humanities and taught the project-based course “Doing Things with Books.” Her children’s book, The Most Boring Book in the World, invites children and adults to reflect on the experience of boredom and experiment with it.