Isabelle Hesse's work is situated at the nexus of postcolonial, Jewish, and Middle Eastern studies. She has particular interests in postcolonial writing and theory, Palestinian and Israeli literature and film, and the cultural memories of colonialism and the Holocaust in Europe.
She is the author of The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism, and Colonialism (2016), the co-editor of Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict after the Second Intifada (2022) and Reimagining Israel and Palestine in Contemporary British and German Culture (2024). Her current project examines how speculative fiction is used to critically engage with settler-colonialism in novels written about Palestine/Israel, Australia, and South Africa.