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2014-2015

Research Fellows

Prof. Luis Roniger
Prof. Luis Roniger is Reynolds Professor of Latin American Studies at Wake Forest University. A comparative political sociologist, Roniger's work focuses on the interface between politics, society and public culture. He has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has been visiting professor at Carleton University, the University of Chicago and universities in Spain, Mexico and Argentina. He is on the international editorial board of several academic journals published in Mexico, Spain, the UK, Israel, Colombia and Argentina. Roniger has published numerous scholarly articles and books, among them Patrons, Clients and Friends (Cambridge University Press, 1984, with SN Eisenstadt); Democracy, Clientelism and Civil Society (with Ayse Günes-Ayata, 1992);The Legacy of Human Rights Violations in the Southern Cone (with Mario Sznajder, also in Portuguese and Spanish 2004 and 2005); Globality and Multiple Modernities (Sussex Academic Press, 2002, with Carlos Waisman); The Politics of Exile in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2009, with Mario Sznajder). Among his most recent works are: Transnational Politics in Central America (University Press of Florida, 2011); Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, co-edited with James N. Green and Pablo Yankelevich (Sussex Academic Press in 2012); Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship in Latin America (co-edited with Sznajder and Carlos Forment, Brill, 2013). The book La política del destierro y el exilio en América Latina (co-written with Mario Sznajder, Fondo de Cultura Econímica, 2013) has been awarded the Arthur Whitaker Prize of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies in 2014.

Prof. David M. K. Sheinin
Davis Sheinin is Professor of History at Trent University (Canada) and a member of the Argentine National Academy of History, the Martin Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution (University of Idaho), and Eloisa Cartonera (Argentina). He is the author of Argentina and the United States: An Alliance Contained (University of Georgia Press, 2006), Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War (University Press of Florida, 2012), and El boxeador incrédulo (Eloisa Cartonera, 2011). He is a past president of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies.

Prof. David Tal
Professor David Tal is the Yossi Harel chair in Israel Studies at University of Sussex, UK. He is an expert in the diplomatic and military history of Israel as well as nuclear proliferation and disarmament. Professor Tal has published several books, including The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma, 1945-1963 (2008), War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy (2004), The 1956 War: Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East (2001- edited) and Israel's Conception of Current Security: Origins and Development 1949-1956 (1998). His articles have appeared in a variety of journals. and at present he is working on a book on Israel Between Orient and Occident. He recently edited a volume titled Israel Identities that was published by Routledge.

Dr. David Rathner
David Ratner received his Ph.d in sociology and anthropology from the Ben Gurion University in August 2013. His dissertation title is: " Black Music and the Construction of Identity among Young Israeli – Ethiopians". It deals with the ways young Israelis of Ethiopian origin use musical likes and dislikes as tools for positioning themselves in Israeli society. His current research project focuses on Biographical Narratives of Members of "Beta Israel" (Ethiopian Jews) Concerning their Lives in Ethiopia in the 60's - 90's. This project will address the issues of political consciousness, political debates and political activism of Ethiopian Jews during the turbulent 60's and 70's and until the early 90's, with the collapse of the Mengistu regime. David's research interests include the Ethiopian-Jewish community in Israel; the political history of Ethiopia; music and identity; race and racism in Israeli society

Junior Fellows

Dr Lucy Rachel Nicholas
My research lies primarily in the fields of Neo-Latin and early modern History (with a particular focus on the Renaissance and the Reformation). A number of my projects are interdisciplinary in nature, involving the translation and historical assessment of Latin tracts written during the sixteenth century. I am particularly interested in the way academic and confessional identities overlapped and interacted during periods of intense religious change. My doctoral thesis (completed 2014) entailed a full review of the Latin theological works of the English humanist and classical scholar, Roger Ascham. Currently I am working on the Latin writings of Walter Haddon, another humanist of Tudor England, and the religious Latin works of Johannes Sturm, an important but neglected reformer in the European Reformation.

2013-2014

Research Fellows

Prof. Sufen Sophia Lai
Professor Sufen Sophia Lai is Professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA, where she teaches world mythology, scriptures as literature and East Asian civilization. She received her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and she enjoys doing research in the areas of comparative mythology and East-West literary relations. Her recent articles include a literary biography of Guo Pu (276-324) in Classical Chinese Writers of the Pre-Tang Period (Gale, 2010) and "Racial Discourse and Utopian Visions in Nineteenth-Century China" in Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions (Brill, 2013). She appreciates the opportunity to spend her sabbatical year at the S. Daniel Abraham Center to work on her research projects and wish to establish contacts with scholars in the field of Biblical Studies in Israel. She loves learning languages (currently studying Hebrew) and long-distance cycling.

Prof. Yoram Peri
Prof. Yoram Peri is the Abraham S. and Jack Kay Chair in Israel Studies, and Director of the new Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies, the University of Maryland at College Park, USA.

A former political advisrr to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Prof. Peri was founder and former head of the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics and Society; professor of Political Sociology and Communication in the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University; and former editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily, Davar.

Born in Jerusalem, he earned his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and has held numerous prestigious positions at universities and academic institutions in Israel and the US. Among his various public positions, Prof. Peri was president of the Association of Editors of Israel's Daily Newspapers and a member of the Press Council. Since 2011 he is also the editor of Israel Studies Review, the flagship academic journal of the Association for Israel Studies (AIS).

Among his books are Generals in the Cabinet Room; The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; Between Battles and Ballots: Israel Military in Politics; and Telepopulism: Media and Politics in Israel. His book (in Hebrew) Brothers at War: Rabin's Assassination and the Cultural War in Israel was granted the 2006 award by the Presidents and Prime Ministers Memorial Council, and his latest book, Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the Military Shapes Israeli Policy, has been selected as an outstanding book and as "one of the best of the best" by the Association of American University Presses, in 2007.

Dr. Cielo Zaidenwerg
Cielo R. Zaidenwerg received her Ph.D. in Latin-American History from the University of Barcelona in June 2013. Her dissertation is entitled "The Argentinization of the National Territories through formal and informal education. Case study: Río Negro (1908-1930)". Her primary research interests in Argentine Studies are: the construction and consolidation of the National State; the specific particularities of the Patagonic region; exploring nationalism, identity and cultural imaginary. For the past five years she has been researching, teaching, and organizing and attending conferences and seminars at the University of Barcelona. Of her many articles published, two of her most recent appeared in 2013: "To love, honour and serve their country. The schools of Río Negro and their contribution to the argentinization of the south (1908-1930)" at Páginas. National University of Rosario (UNR) / CONICET (Argentina); and "A patriotic project for National Territories. Education and ephemeris in the Argentinean Patagonia and Rio Negro during the first decades of the twentieth century" at Unisinios. Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Brazil). At the moment Dr. Zaidenwerg is immersed in a post-doc research project, investigating the images that other nations had about the Patagonian region throughout the twentieth century. Some of the countries she wants to include are Spain, USA and UK. This topic is ground breaking research because it's a field that has been hardly addressed either in Argentine historiography or international historiography. Since her main interest lies in cultural ideas of the times, her historical sources are mainly press articles and photographs.

Junior Fellows:

Jacob Hutt
Jacob Hutt is a Fulbright Research Scholar focusing on strengths and weaknesses of the Law of Return with regards to immigration from developing nations, using the growing Cuban Jewish expatriate population as a case study. This project is an expansion of his recently completed undergraduate thesis at Harvard University, entitled "Rising Civil Society, Falling Egalitarianism: The Jewish Association in Post-Totalitarian Cuba," which examined the Cuban Jewish community and its special opportunities for emigration from Cuba. He will conduct his research at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Professor Raanan Rein. Jacob graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. magna cum laude in Social Studies in 2013.

María Tardín
María Tardín is a PhD candidate in the field of Political Science and International Relations. She belongs to Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, and her thesis topic is "The non-solution of the Middle East Conflict: Actors and Factors involved". The objective of her research is to find the key aspects that have contributed to the failure of the peace process, as it has been conceived since Oslo, to establish the basis of this paradigm, and to try to shape new ones, emphasizing the role of the UE and, especially, the role of Spain. María has worked before on Israel Foreign Policy and on the problem of water scarcity in the Middle East; she has also collaborated with the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs within the Middle East Relations Department.

Ari Varon
Ari Varon is currently a Ph.D. student in Political Science co advised from two institutions: the University of Sciences Po located in Paris France as well as at Tel Aviv University in Israel. His Dissertation focuses on the formation of an Islamic political identity in contemporary Europe. Ari served as the Deputy Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel from April 2005 through April 2009. His responsibilities included assisting to prepare the Prime Minister for all matters relating to Israeli foreign policy. Before working at the Prime Minister's office Ari received his Masters degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington DC with a dual concentration in strategic studies and international law and a specialization in quantitative international economics. In conjunction with his studies in Washington he worked part time at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He obtained his Bachelors degree in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

2012-2013

Research Fellows

Dr. Basanta K. Sahu
Dr. Basanta K. Sahu is Asst. Professor (Economics) at Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi, India. Now he is ICCR Chair Professor at Tel Aviv University, Israel where he teaches two courses on Indian Economy to graduate and under graduste students. Dr. Sahu is an expert in field based policy research and analysis in economics and social development issues and relating it with international trade. His major research areas include Risk Coping Analysis: (Household Risk Priority, Intra-household Risk Coping); Microfinance: (Microinsurance, Microfinance for Housing, Rural credit markets); Agriculture & Rural Livelihood Issues: (Agrarian constraints, Factor Markets, Drought and Food Insecurity, Non-farm Sector, Rural Employment & Migration); Regional Growth & Poverty Analysis: (Multi-dimensions of poverty) and Gender issues.

He is actively engaged in Management Development Programme & Consultancy in the areas of Economics; International Business; Agriculture; Gender & Social Sector Issues; Microfinance.
Dr. Sahu has worked with Indian Institute of Management; Institute of Economic Growth; NIPFP; BIRD (NABARD) and Sambalpur University. He has traveled number of countries in Asia, Africa and Europe to deliver lecture, teach, research and conduct training programme for senior executives.

In 2012 he was awarded with 'Platinum Jubilee Award' by the Governor of Odisha for his work on drought, poverty and backwardness in Odisha, India.

Prof. Jeffrey Lesser
Jeffrey Lesser is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University and Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. He's focusing on ethnicity, immigration and race, especially in Brazil. He's the author of numerous books and articles. While at The S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, Prof. Lesser is researching the immigration to Brazil and Asian, Jewish and Arab diasporas in the Americas.

Dr. David Tal
Dr. David Tal is the Kahanoff Chair in Israel Studies and a professor in the Department of History at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada since Summer 2009. He is also the Director of the Israel Studies program at University of Calgary. He is an expert in the diplomatic and military history of Israel as well as nuclear proliferation and disarmament. Professor Tal has published several books, including The American Nuclear Disarmament Dilemma, 1945-1963 (2008), War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy (2004), The 1956 War: Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East (2001- edited) and Israel's Conception of Current Security: Origins and Development 1949-1956 (1998). His articles have appeared in a variety of journals and at present he is working on a book on Israel Between Orient and Occident.

Junior Fellows:

Paulina Biernacka
Paulina is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. Her research examines the question of ontological security in international relations. She is focusing especially on security policy of Israel in the last decade, when Israel was facing lots of threats to its national identities as a Jewish, democratic and security-seeking state. She is an analyst on Middle Eastern affairs at the Civic Institute - political think-tank and a lecturer at the Collegium Civitas University where she is giving a lecture of Foreign and Security Policy of Israel

Ori Rotlevy
As a junior fellow of the center Ori Rotlevy will work on his dissertation entitled "Orientation, Philosophy and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project". The project investigates the analogy between orientation in space and orientation in thought in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This interdisciplinary dissertation combines historical analysis of Benjamin's account of modern urban experience with the analysis of the form of his thought on a philosophical background including Kant and Heidegger. This method allows answering questions regarding the effect of modern urban experience on thought, and regarding the revolutionary potential "urbanized" thought might have.

2011-2012

Research Fellows

Dr. Alan Astro
Dr. Alan Astro (Ph.D., Yale) is professor of French and Spanish at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is the editor of Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Yiddish Writing from Latin America (University of New Mexico Press, 2003) and Discourses of Jewish Identity in 20th- Century France (Yale French Studies 85: 1994). As a research fellow at The S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, Prof. Astro will continue his research on Yiddish literature from Latin America and France, as well as literature on and by Jews in French and Spanish.

Dr. Amalia Ran
Dr. Amalia Ran is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her research focuses on Jewish Latin American literature and culture, contemporary Argentinean fiction, literary criticism and cultural studies. She is the author of numerous articles. Her book Made of Shores: Rethinking Identities, Interpreting the Past? was accepted for publication at Lehigh University Press (2009). At present, she is preparing as a co-editor a special volume entitled Returning to Babel: Jewish Latin American Experiences and Representations to be published by Nebraska University Press. As a Research Fellow at the Abraham Center, Dr. Ran is working on a new book, Reconstructing Literary Cartographies in Argentina: Towards a Transnational Literature?, which explores how socio-economic, cultural, and linguistic transformations impact literary cartographies and reshape them.

Prof. Jan T. Gross
Prof. Jan T. Gross, Princeton University, studies modern Europe, focusing on comparative politics, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Soviet and East European politics, and the Holocaust. His first book, Polish Society under German Occupation, appeared in 1979. Revolution from Abroad (1988) analyzes how the Soviet regime was imposed in Poland and the Baltic states between 1939 and 1941. Neighbors (2001), reconstructs the events that took place in July 1941 in the small Polish town of Jedwabne, where virtually every one of the town's 1,600 Jewish residents was killed in a single day. Using eyewitness testimony Professor Gross demonstrates that the Jews of Jedwabne were murdered by their Polish neighbors "not by the German occupiers, as previously assumed". Professor Gross is also the author of several books in Polish, the coeditor of The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (2000), and the coeditor with Irena Grudzinska-Gross of War Through Children's Eyes

Junior Fellows:

Guy Lurie
Guy Lurie is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History, Georgetown University. At the Curiel Institute, Guy Lurie will work on his dissertation entitled "Citizenship in Later Medieval France." The project investigates the interconnections between political thought, political society and the practice of citizenship in the law and politics of France from c. 1380 to c. 1480. The dissertation illustrates how political thought was put into practice in the specific context of citizenship.

Roni Ratzkovsky
Roni Ratzkovsky has recently submitted her dissertation entitled "City, Alter-City: German Intellectuals writing on Paris, 1900-1933". The dissertation examines the German image of Paris during the first third of the 20th century, in the context of the German discourse regarding the phenomenon of the modern city in general, and Berlin in particular. The study revolves around a comparison between the images of Berlin and Paris, as manifested in the writings of contemporary intellectuals for whom these two cities were a fundamental frame of reference. As a junior fellow at the center she is writing a few articles on topics related to the subject of the dissertation

2010-2011

Research Fellows

Dr. Amalia Ran
Dr. Amalia Ran is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her research focuses on Jewish Latin American literature and culture, contemporary Argentinean fiction, literary criticism and cultural studies.She is the author of numerous articles. Her book Made of Shores: Rethinking Identities, Interpreting the Past? was accepted for publication at Lehigh University Press (2009). At present, she is preparing as a co-editor a special volume entitled Returning to Babel: Jewish Latin American Experiences and Representations to be published by Nebraska University Press. As a Research Fellow at the Abraham Center, Dr. Ran is working on a new book, Reconstructing Literary Cartographies in Argentina: Towards a Transnational Literature?, which explores how socio-economic, cultural, and linguistic transformations impact literary cartographies and reshape them.

Dr. Hillel Eyal
Hillel Eyal is a Fellow at Tel Aviv University working in the field of Latin American history. He received his PhD in history from UCLA in September 2006. His research examines the social history of Spanish immigration in colonial Mexico, focusing on the growing conflict between European Spaniards and Mexican-born Creoles towards the end of the colonial period. His broader historical interests are Atlantic history and comparative colonialism in the early modern world. His thematic interests include social and economic history, historical demography and quantitative methods. As a Research Fellow, he is pursuing a comparative project on transatlantic immigration and Spanish identity throughout colonial Spanish America.

Junior Fellows:

2009-2010

Fellows:

Porf. Shail Mayaram
Porf. Shail Mayaram has explored subaltern perspectives on state and sovereignty, mobilities and identities in relation to peasant, pastoral and Âoetribal" peoples. As a theorist of violence she has worked on inter-ethnic relations in Asian cities including dimensions of conflict, coexistence and conviviality. Her intellectual engagement has also been in the larger field of religion and politics, the question of conversion, transnational religious movements and political theologies with implications for democracy and secularism. Her current interests are in writing a history of cosmopolitanism and in the project of swaraj in ideas and its implications for decolonizing knowledge.
Publications include Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); coauthored with Ashis Nandy, Shikha Trivedi, Achyut Yagnik, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); coedited with Ajay Skaria and MSS Pandian, Subaltern Studies: Muslims, Dalits and the fabrications of history vol 12 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005); edited, The Other Global City (New York and London: Routledge, 2009) and Philosophy as Samvada and Svaraja: Dialogical Meditations on Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi (Shimla and Delhi: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, forthcoming). A current book project is titled, Nationalism in the time of Imperial Terror: From the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana.

Dr. Martin J. Wein
Dr. Martin J. Wein Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1973, I grew up in West Germany and spent several years in the Czech Republic and the United States, where I received an M.A. in Jewish studies from Emory University. I settled in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel in 2001 and received a doctorate in Jewish history from Ben Gurion University in 2007. My academic interests include Jewish history and Christian-Jewish relations in the Bohemian Lands, Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the early modern and modern period, Antisemitism and the Holocaust, as well as Jewish-defined languages, religious aspects of linguistics, theory of nationalism and historical theory. My academic homepage is located at www.mjwein.net.

Dr. Amalia Ran
Dr. Amalia Ran is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her research focuses on Jewish Latin American literature and culture, contemporary Argentinean fiction, literary criticism and cultural studies.She is the author of numerous articles. Her book Made of Shores: Rethinking Identities, Interpreting the Past? was accepted for publication at Lehigh University Press (2009). At present, she is preparing as a co-editor a special volume entitled Returning to Babel: Jewish Latin American Experiences and Representations to be published by Nebraska University Press. As a Research Fellow at the Abraham Center, Dr. Ran is working on a new book, Reconstructing Literary Cartographies in Argentina: Towards a Transnational Literature?, which explores how socio-economic, cultural, and linguistic transformations impact literary cartographies and reshape them.

Prof. Jacob L Wright
Dr. Wright taught for several years at the University of Heidelberg before coming to Candler, where he offers courses on biblical interpretation, the history and archaeology of ancient Israel, and Northwest Semitic languages. He is the author of a number of articles on Ezra-Nehemiah as well as Rebuilding Identity: The Nehemiah Memoir and Its Earliest Readers, which won a 2008 Templeton prize (the largest prize for first books in religion). In addition to responsibilities in the excavations at Ramat Rachel (located outside Jerusalem), he is currently writing articles and a book that examine the role war and the military played in ancient Israelite society.

Junior Fellows:

Lior Ben David
Lior Ben David is a PhD Candidate at the Sverdlin Institute for Latin American History and Culture, The School of History, Tel Aviv University. His PhD dissertation, entitled Indians and Indigenistas in the Field of Criminal Law: The Cases of Mexico and Peru, 1910s-1960s, scrutinizes the image, representation and treatment of the Indians and of the ?Indian question? in the criminal justice system of each of these countries during the said period, employing a comparative stance and a combination of different perspectives - historical, legal and criminological. It is conducted under the supervision of Dr. Gerardo Leibner and Prof. Assaf Likhovski.

Daniel Kressel
Daniel G. Kressel is a PhD student of contemporary European History in the History graduate program at Tel Aviv University. His focuses on the European post-war memory politics, especially those involving the symbolic mechanisms which have established and acknowledged victim status. His MA thesis proposed new insights into the historical polemic regarding the nature of the alleged Spanish *pact of oblivion*, by pointing to the self-victimized narration assumed by the publicist elite in Madrid during the Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Daniel Lis
Daniel Lis is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Jewish Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland. His historical and anthropological research focuses on processes of Judaization, especially on the Igbo ethnic group from Southeastern Nigeria. He's the author of several articles in English and German, director of an ethnographic documentary film and Vize-President of the International Society for the Study of African Jewry (ISSAJ). While at Tel Aviv University, Daniel Lis is co-teaching a course on African migrations and identities together with Dr. Galia Sabar, as well as conducting research for the conclusion of his dissertation.

David Mano
Mano is a Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University. He graduated from Venice University (Ca' Foscari) in 2000. His research at the School of Historical Studies focuses on judicial sources from the Tuscan village of Pitigliano and proposes a micro-analysis of the relations between Jews and Christians during the Italian revolutionary age (end of the 18th century). Mr. Mano is the author of several articles on Jewish subjects and a translator from Hebrew literature. He is currently writing his dissertation.

Hagar Spiro

2008-2009

Prof. Carlos Waisman
Carlos Waisman received his Ph.D. from Harvard. His field is comparative political sociology. He has worked on the incorporation of the working class in the political system in different countries, the causes of diverse elite strategies toward labor, the development of Argentina, the consolidation of new democracies, and the transitions to open-market capitalism in the Southern Cone of Latin America and Central/Eastern Europe. He has published Modernization and the Working Class: The Politics of Legitimacy (University of Texas Press, 1982), Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and their Political Consequences (Princeton University Press, 1987), winner of the Hubert Herring Award for the best book of the year in Latin American studies), From Military Rule to Liberal Democracy in Argentina (Westview Press, 1987), and Institutional Design in New Democracies: Eastern Europe and Latin America (Westview Press, 1996).

Prof. Amrit Srinivasan

Dr. Hillel Eyal
Hillel Eyal is a Dan David Fellow at Tel Aviv University working in the field of Latin American history. He received his PhD in history from UCLA in September 2006. His research examines the social history of Spanish immigration in colonial Mexico, focusing on the growing conflict between European Spaniards and Mexican-born Creoles towards the end of the colonial period. His broader historical interests are Atlantic history and comparative colonialism in the early modern world. His thematic interests include social and economic history, historical demography and quantitative methods. As a Research Fellow, he is pursuing a comparative project on transatlantic immigration and Spanish identity throughout colonial Spanish America.

Dr. Eran Segal
Doctoral candidate in social sciences for the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Scholarship of the CONICET -National Commission of Technical and Scientific Researching). Magister (Mg) in cultural diversity for the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). His first academic degree was in Political Science. Researcher in the Center of Genocide Studies (UNTREF-Argentina) and in the History of the Ideas area (Universidad de Belgrano-Argentina) Co-editor of the Revista de Estudios sobre Genocidio and author of La modernidad atravesada. Teología Política y Mesianismo (Miño y Dávila Editores, Buenos Aires, 2008) and Otredad, orientalismo e identidad (Teseo, Buenos Aires, 2008).

Prof. Nicholas Terpstra
Professor Terpstra is a specialist in the social history of Renaissance and early modern Italy. He has published extensively on urban society, charitable institutions, and confraternities. His books include Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Johns Hopkins: 2005) and Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge University Press: 1995), which was awarded the Howard R. Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies. He has edited three collections, The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (forthcoming), The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: 2000) and Civic Self-Fashioning in Renaissance Bologna (special issue of Renaissance Studies vol. 13/4 [1999]), and co-edited three others: Sociability & Its Discontents: Social Capital & Civil Society in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe with N. Eckstein (Brepols: 2008), The Renaissance in the Streets, Schools, and Studies with K. Eisenbichler (Toronto: 2008), The Renaissance in the 19th Century with Y. Portebois (Toronto: 2003). He is currently working on a set of projects having to do with the politics and economics of charity. Prof. Terpestra will be attached to the Curiel center from the end of March to mid-May, 2009.

Junior Fellows

Elena Baibikov
Elena Baibikov submitted her Ph.D. at The Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies of Kyoto University. Elena specializes in social and cultural aspects of translation, mostly focusing on the literary translation from Russian and Hebrew into Japanese. As an M.A. and Ph.D. student, she was awarded with five years MEXT scholarship, provided by Japanese government. While at The Shirley and Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies, Elena is researching on the translator?s activity as entrepreneurs of culture in the wider context of cultural diffusion, using the case of Japanese translators of Israeli-Hebrew literature. Additional emphasis in her research is put on translator?s professional self-fashioning.

Aya Lahav-Elyada
Aya Elyada is a graduate student for German-Jewish History at The Graduate School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University. She is writing her dissertation, ?Early Modern Christian Literature on Yiddish in the German-Speaking World?, under the supervision of Prof. Shulamit Volkov (Tel Aviv University) and Prof. Michael Brenner (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich). Aya has published several papers in Hebrew, English, and German, and participated in numerous conferences and workshops in Israel, Germany, England, and the USA.

Chen Kertcher
Chen Kertcher is a Ph.D. student at the School of History, Tel Aviv University. Currently he is at the final stages of writing his dissertation titled: The UN and Peacekeeping in Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia and Somalia, 1988-1995. His MA thesis won an award and was published in Gitelson Peace Publications in 2003. His field of experties are military and diplomatic history in the modern age, the United Nations its role in the international system and especially its use of peacekeeping operations from the cold war to our times, World and Global Histories. He has a rich teaching experience in various topics on military and diplomatic history and the Middle East. He also served as the head of Academic Division in Avni Institute, the College for Art and Design Tel-Aviv.

Ori Rotlevy
As a junior fellow of the center Ori Rotlevy will work on his dissertation entitled ?Orientation, Philosophy and Walter Benjamin?s Arcades Project?. The project investigates the analogy between orientation in space and orientation in thought in Walter Benjamin?s Arcades Project. This interdisciplinary dissertation combines historical analysis of Benjamin?s account of modern urban experience with the analysis of the form of his thought on a philosophical background including Kant and Heidegger. This method allows answering questions regarding the effect of modern urban experience on thought, and regarding the revolutionary potential ?urbanized? thought might have.

Hagar Spiro

Emmanuel Taub
Doctoral candidate in social sciences for the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Scholarship of the CONICET -National Commission of Technical and Scientific Researching). Magister (Mg) in cultural diversity for the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). His first academic degree was in Political Science. Researcher in the Center of Genocide Studies (UNTREF-Argentina) and in the History of the Ideas area (Universidad de Belgrano-Argentina) Co-editor of the Revista de Estudios sobre Genocidio and author of La modernidad atravesada. Teología Política y Mesianismo (Miño y Dávila Editores, Buenos Aires, 2008) and Otredad, orientalismo e identidad (Teseo, Buenos Aires, 2008).

2007-2008

Prof. Robert Johnson
KC Johnson is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on the intersection of politics and policy, especially involving the U.S. Congress and international affairs. He's the author of five books and numerous articles. While at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Johnson is teaching courses on the United States and the Middle East, 20th century U.S. foreign relations, and 20th century American politics, as well as continuing his research for a book on Cold War U.S. foreign policy.

Dr. Hillel Eyal

Dr. Silvina Schammah Gesser
Silvina Schammah Gesser submitted her Ph.D. at The Graduate School of Historical Studies, at Tel Aviv University. She specializes in Spanish cultural history of the 20th century, with emphasis on the political discourse of the artistic vanguards prior to the Spanish Civil War. She has published on these topics and has been awarded various research grants such as the Fulbright fellowship, the Spanish grant for Hispanistas and the Hebrew University Ginsberg fellowship. While at The S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies, she is researching on the interrelations among collective memory during Spain?s transition to democracy, the role of culture and the arts in the internationalization of post-Francoist Spain and various forms of institutional commemorations of the Spanish Civil War.

2006-2007

Prof. Jeffrey Lesser

Dr. Claudia Kedar