Biography

Maoz Azaryahu (Hebrew: מעוז עזריהו) is an emeritus professor of cultural geography at the University of Haifa in Israel. He completed his B.Sc. in physics in 1975, was awarded an M.A. in history in 1983 and obtained his PhD in history in 1988 at Tel Aviv University.  His Ph.D. thesis was on political symbolism in East Germany, focusing on renaming streets in East Berlin. This was one of the first scholarly works devoted explicitly to the examination of how commemorative street naming is embedded into the ideological design of urban space and the construction of official political identity.

He continued to postdoctoral studies at the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University and taught as guest professor at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada (1991). He has also been a visiting professor in Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University (2000) and in Israel Studies at Brandeis University (2010). Since 1993 he taught in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Haifa, becoming a full professor in 2011 and retired in 2023. From 2017 through 2025 he served as the director of Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism at the University of Haifa, where he initiated, assisted, and directed research on the political and cultural history of Zionism and the State of Israel. In 2020 he was awarded the UConn’s First Global Distinguished Humanities Fellowship. 

Among his public activities:  Member of the Advisory Council of the Knesset Museum (2011-2018), Member of the Advisory Committee for the establishment of the IDF Museum (2011), Jury Member in the competition for the construction of a monument to the Soviet victory in World War II in Netanya (2011), Member of the Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi Public Council (2011-2015),Member of the board of Stiftung Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (2015-2025), and Member of the Street Naming Committee of the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality (2020 – ).