Gal is a cultural art historian in the Department of Art History at the Hebrew University. Her research, which focuses on 19th-century French art, an epoch of revolutionary political, demographic, and cultural changes, deals with socio-medical aspects of childhood, maternity, breastfeeding, pain, death. Her most recent essays have appeared in Studies in the Maternal; Journal of Social History; Design and Culture; Design for Health; Visual Resources; Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Social History of Medicine, and Journal of Design History. Her new book, due out in 2022, focuses on the history of sleep and examines the historical, cultural, economic, and medical circumstances that led parents to control and normalize their children’s sleep.

Publications

• Ventura, Gal. Hush Little Baby: The Invention of Infant Sleep in Modern France.  McGill‐Queen’s University Press, 2023.
• Ventura, Gal. “The Design of the Modern Crib: Hygiene, Configuration, Materiality, and Social Status.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 45/4, Special Issue: Design and its Relations (Forthcoming, 2024).
• Ventura, Gal. “I Queue, Therefore I Am: Splendeurs et misères of Waiting in Line in Nineteenth Century Paris.” Journal of Modern History (Forthcoming, 2025).