Dr. Yael Berda
Academic head of the program
Dr. Yael Berda is an Assistant Professor (lecturer) in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Hebrew University. She teaches courses on the intersections of law, race, bureaucracy, and the state, within a colonial and imperial context.
She is an Israeli Lawyer and holds a PhD from the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. Born in New York City and raised in West Jerusalem, Dr. Berda has been highly engaged in social justice activism and politics in Israel.
Dr. Berda graduated from the Faculty of Law at Hebrew University and received her MA (Magna cum laude) from the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.
Her master’s thesis looked at the bureaucracy of the occupation in the Palestinian territory. The first institutional ethnography of the permit regime in the West bank, it explores the influence of Colonial administrative legacies on the contemporary military civil administration in the occupied territories.
Her first book, “The Bureaucracy of the Occupation in the West Bank: The Permit Regime 2000-2006” was published in July 2012, by the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and Hakibutz Hameuhad Publishing (Hebrew).
In 2014-2015, and 2016 Dr. Berda was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs in Cambridge, MA.
Dr. Berda’s current book project examines the persistence of bureaucratic legacies following independence in former colonies, focusing on population management practices and the construction of political membership in states afflicted by partition plans: Israel, Cyprus and India. Her work has been recognized and supported by grants from SSRC, The National Science Foundation, The ACLS, The Ford Foundation and others. She is currently working on the manuscript of Administrative Memory and Colonial Legacies in India, Israel & Cyprus.
Prof. Israel Bartal
Israel Bartal is the Avraham Harman Professor of Modern Jewish History and the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences (since 2016). His research interests include Jewish Orthodoxy, Eastern European Jewish history in the modern period, the Haskala movement, the pre-Zionist Jewish community in Palestine and the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism. Prof. Bartal is one of the founders of Cathedra, a leading scholarly journal on the history of the Land of Israel.
Dr. Alexandra Herfroy-Mischler
Alexandra Herfroy-Mischler (Ph.D) is an Associate Researcher at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the French CNRS (CRFJ) in Jerusalem. She lectures at the Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University as well as in the Journalism and Communication Department. She completed her Ph.D at the Department of Media Studies, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, (Paris 3), France. Her research focuses on Journalism Practices and Political Communication with an emphasis on transitional justice/ conflict resolution, intelligence and counter-terrorism. Her research has been published in Media, War & Conflict Journal (2015), Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism (2016; 2018), Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (2017), Visual Communication (2019), and Journalism Studies (2020).
Prof. Arie Kacowicz
Prof. Arie M. Kacowicz is the Chaim Weizmann Chair in International Relations and Full Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A Faculty member of the Hebrew University since 1993, and an Adjunct Lecturer at Georgetown since 2003, Prof. Kacowicz is the author and editor of ten books, the last one being The Unintended Consequences of Peace: Peaceful Borders and Illicit Transnational Flows to be published by Cambridge University Press in the Summer of 2021 (in collaboration with Exequiel Lacovksy, Keren Sasson, and Daniel F. Wajner). His areas of interests include theories of international relations, peace studies, globalization and governance, international relations of Latin America, and peace negotiations in the context of the Middle East.
Dr. Tanya Sermer
Tanya Sermer is adjunct faculty at the Rothberg International School, in the graduate, undergraduate, and Mechina programs, and in the Unit for English as a Foreign Language. She received her Ph.D. in musicology and ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. She was awarded a dissertation research fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and post-doctoral fellowships from the Israel Institute and Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, all of which were carried out at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Tanya also works as artistic producer of the Jerusalem Oratorio Choir and as researcher at the Jewish Music Research Center. Tanya’s academic work has been published in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and in books published by Ashgate and the University of Haifa. Her research focuses on music of Israel and the Arab Middle East, as well as Jewish and Islamic music and chant. In particular, she investigates the politics of music and sound in the public sphere, including the role of music in nation-building, protest, conflict, gender politics, and the production of space
Prof. Noam Shoval
Prof. Noam Shoval is the Director of the European Forum and the Director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; from 2017-2022 he served as the Provost of the Rothberg International School; he completed his PhD at The Hebrew University (2000) and conducted post-doctoral research at the Department of Geography, King’s College, University of London (2000–2001); in 2007–2008, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Department of Geography of the University of Heidelberg (Germany); in 2014-2015 he was a visiting Professor at the Center for Urban and Social Research at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Prof. Shoval’s main research interests are urban geography and planning, urban tourism and the implementation of advanced tracking technologies in various areas of spatial research such as tourism and urban studies, and medicine.
Prof. Gad Yair
Gad Yair is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His academic interests are social theory, culture and education. Professor Yair is a popular commentator in Israeli media channels and occasionally contributes op-ed pieces to Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post. In 2011 he published, The Code of Israeliness: The Ten Commandments for the 21st Century. The book explains Israeli culture in terms of the clash between Judaism and Zionism around interpreting the ancient traumas that haunt the Jewish people. Professor Yair received his Ph.D. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1994).
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