Chen Mandel-Edrei is a postdoctoral fellow at the Open University of Israel, where she is also a lecturer in the department of Literature, Language, and the Arts and in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies. Mandel-Edrei earned her B.A. and M.A. in Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her Ph.D. in Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. She is currently working on her monograph about Hasidic literature as modern popular culture, tentatively titled: "Hagiography in the Age of Mass Media: Hasidic Writing and the Making of Jewish Modernity".