Nir Rotem is a transnational sociologist specializing in knowledge, globalization, and social theory. He wrote his dissertation about the UNHCR at the University of Minnesota and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations. His current research agenda delves into the rise of illiberal global norms. This project seeks to understand whether illiberalism emerges from local contexts or diffuses through the institutional structures promoting liberalism.

 

Dr. Ofek Riemer is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the coordinator of the Israeli Forum for Intelligence Studies (IFIS). He received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2022 for his work on public intelligence disclosure in international relations, which received the Israel Political Science Association Award for Best Dissertation that year. Dr. Riemer’s research centers on the international politics of secrecy and the nexus between intelligence, foreign policy, and society. His research was published in Contemporary Security Policy, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Strategic Assessment, and War on the Rocks.

Dr. Shani Friedman is a lawyer and has a PhD from the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her fields of expertise are international relations, and international law, specifically the law of the sea and international institutions. She was a postdoctoral researcher in international law at UBO, AMURE lab, Brest, France, as part of the DEEPREST project. Within the project, she researches different questions relating to the legal regime and governance framework of deep-sea mining such as liability, sharing of benefits and interaction with other frameworks within the law of the sea, such as the BBNJ agreement. Her current research project focuses on questions concerning the global freedom of navigation, collective security and maritime security, and the governance of common interests.

She can be found on Twitter, LinkedIn

Gil Shaham-Maymon's research focuses on cities, their shifting responsibilities in relation to the state, local communities' dynamics within urban environments, and political theory of the city. Her current study examines cities with ethno-national divisions, placing particular emphasis on local peacebuilding initiatives as a means to reconstruct urban citizenship and safeguard residents' rights at the local level.

 

Michael Rabi Syrkin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations and the Department of International Relations, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his PhD at the Federmann School of Public Policy and Governance, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His ethnographic and historical research has focused on the intersection of health governance, international politics, and emergency. Michael's work has been published in journals that specialize in areas such as international relations, health sociology, public policy, Science and Technology Studies, and history. In his current research project on "Post-Emergency Politics and the (Re)Shaping of Global Health Governance", he is investigating politics in the aftermath of emergencies and their consequences.

 

Research interests: international political economy, international organizations and the global investment regime, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, and the contestation of the international liberal order. Her dissertation explores the positions and attitudes of MENA countries towards the global investment regime using quantitative and qualitative methods.

 I am a literature scholar and comparatist working on the interaction between fictional stories and real-world harm and repair. I specialize in contemporary Hebrew and Global Anglophone fiction, affect theory, and postcolonial studies. Currently at the Sophie Davis Forum, I am working on the representation of female soldiers in Israeli and U.S.-American cultures in the twenty-first century. I track a significant shift in military representation: from heroic male soldiers to disaffected female ones, across contemporary media from 2010 to the present. Drawing on affect theory, security studies, and cultural criticism, the research examines how female soldiers in literature, film, and visual culture serve as metonyms for changing civic experiences of power, complicity, and state-sanctioned violence.

I received my PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell (2022), and was an ISF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bar Ilan English Department (2023-2025).  I have published essays on gender and the ethics of complicity in contemporary fiction from South Africa and Israel/Palestine.

דר' נאהד אשקר שרארי בעלת תואר ראשון ושני לעבודה הסוציאלית.

בשנת 2017 סיימתי את כתיבת התיזה בנושא "אתגרי הפמיניזם האסלאמי בישראל" שזכתה בשני פרסים; ממרכז חיים הרצוג לחקר המזרח התיכון, וממכון וולטר ליבך לחינוך לדו קיום יהודי-ערבי. בשנת 2022 סיימתי את כתיבת הדוקטורט בנושא "זהויות דתיות בקרב נשים מוסלמיות בישראל בקונטקסט של משפחה, חברה ומדינה" שזכתה בפרס דן דיוויד למצוינות אקדמית.

בין השנים 2020-2022 עבדתי כחברת סגל במכון מנדל בנגב ומרצה בתוכנית למגדר באוניברסיטת בן גוריון בנגב שבמסגרת זו לימדתי שלושה קורסים-שניים מהם, לראשונה הנלמדים בישראל; התפתחום הפמיניזם האסלאמי בישראל ובעולם , ואומנות פמיניסטית אסלאמית.

בשנה האקדמית 2002 הייתי חוקרת אורחת באוניברסיטת ג'ורג'יה בארצות הברית.

בשנת 2023, קיבלתי את מלגת פולברייט ויצאתי לפוסט דוקטורט באוניברסיטת ניו יורק בארצות הברית.

יש לי מספר מאמרים שפרסמתי בשלושת השפות: אנגלית, עברית וערבית שאחד מהם זכה במקום השני בפרס:Elisabeth Schüüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (2^nd place winner). .

Veronica Lion is completing her Ph.D. at the Department of Gender Studies at Bar Ilan University on current women-led peace movements in Israel, funded by the Presidential Doctoral Fellowship of Excellence, supervised by Prof. Orna Sasson-Levy and Dr. Gilly Hartal. She holds a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Gender Studies from the University of Vienna. For her Ph.D. Veronica received the 2023 Prize from the Walter Lebach Institute for the Study of Jewish-Arab Coexistence, and the Bar Siman Tov Prize for research in the field of Peace and the Israeli-Arab Conflict by the Israeli Association for International Studies. She published two articles, including “Between Peripherality and Privilege: ‘Women Wage Peace’ as a Case Study of Intersectionality Practices in Women’s Movements’, Social Movements (2024) and “‘Peace can only come wrapped in the Israeli flag.’ -  A new framing for a new women’s peace movement”, Mobilization (forthcoming). As a Sophie Davis Post-Doctoral Fellow, Veronica will conduct a comparative analysis of gendered social movement responses to external political transformations, such as large-scale national protests or war including the 2023 Pro-Democracy protests and the Israel-Hamas war following October 7^th.