people
Dr. Rotem Geva
I am a historian of South Asia with a focus on twentieth-century India. My research and teaching interests encompass nationalism and state formation, territorial partitions, urban history, colonialism and decolonization. I hold a joint appointment in the History Department and the Department of Asian Studies.
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I earned my PhD from the Department of History at Princeton University and my M.A. in anthropology from the New School for Social Research. My book, Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital (Stanford University Press, 2022), was shortlisted for the 2023 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize, sponsored by the New India Foundation. It delves into the history of Delhi during the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, examining the city’s transformation under the pressures of the Second World War and the partition of India. Bridging studies of high politics with the ground-level experience of partition, it shows what the politics of the nation-state meant in everyday life. My current project explores citizenship formation in the new republic. It centers on Delhi from decolonization to the suspension of democracy during the Emergency rule (1975-1977) and its restoration afterward. This research explores how different sections of urban society conceptualized, interpreted, and asserted citizenship in the new republic, shaping Indian democracy in the process.
I teach a range of courses, including the survey course “Introduction to Modern India” and seminars on colonialism, urban history, gender and caste, the Gandhian movements, the Cold War in South Asia, and the transnational history of twentieth-century partitions.
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Prof. Yuval Noah Harari
Harari originally specialized in world history, medieval history and military history. His current research focuses on macro-historical questions such as: What is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?
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Harari is the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Sapiens: A Graphic History, and more recently, the children's book series "Unstoppable Us".
Born in Israel in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002. In 2019, following the international success of his books, Yuval Noah Harari and Itzik Yahav co-founded Sapienship: a social impact company with projects in the fields of entertainment and education. Sapienship’s main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today.
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Prof. Yitzhak Hen
Director of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies
Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Yitzhak Hen is an historian of western Europe and the Mediterranean in Late
Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. His research focuses on the social, cultural and
intellectual history of the post-Roman Barbarians kingdoms of the early medieval
Prof. (emeritus) Benjamin Kedar
Research fields: The crusades, comparative world history
Dr. Reimund Leicht
Ethel Backenroth Senior Lecturer In Medieval Jewish Studies
I am a senior lecturer at the History Department and the Department for Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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My fields of interest are the history of philosophy and science in Jewish cultures in the Middles Ages and early modern times within its context in the Islamicate and Christian Worlds, the intellectual history of the Jewish in late Antiquity, Christian-Jewish relations and Christian Kabbalah (Johannes Reuchlin) and the history of 19th-century Wissenschaft das Judentums (Science of Judaism). I am co-directing together with Prof. Giuseppe Veltri (Hamburg) the project for the construction of a digitized thesaurus of pre-modern Hebrew terminology in philosophy and science “PESHAT in Context” (www.peshat.org).
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Prof. Amnon Linder
Studies the general intellectual life of Medieval Europe, with a particular emphasis on the Christian variable approaches towards Jews, Judaism, Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
Dr. Lee Mordechai
Lee Mordechai is a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, also called the Byzantine Empire. He completed his doctoral studies at Princeton University (graduated in 2017) and went on to postdoctoral at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana) and at the Institute of Environmental Studies at Annapolis (Maryland).
Dr. Iris Nachum
Deputy Director of the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights
Humanities Building, Rooms 44-610 and 41-529.
Office Hours: Wednesdays, upon appointment
I am a historian of modern Central Europe with a special interest in compensation and restitution; liberalism and nationalism; ethnic conflict and expulsion. My research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary, covering history, political theory and law. Since September 2020, I serve as Deputy Academic Director of the Jacob Robinson Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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I hold a B.A. and M.A. degree in political science, and in 2017, I received my PhD from the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. The topic of my dissertation is the Sudeten German discourse on compensation in interwar Czechoslovakia, which I trace back to the national conflict between ethnic Germans and Czechs in the post-1848 Habsburg monarchy. The topic of my current book-length project is a West German compensation law called “Equalization of Burdens Law” (Lastenausgleichsgesetz). The main aim of this 1952 law was to compensate ethnic Germans who had been expelled or forced to flee from Central and Eastern Europe to Germany at the end of World War II. Compensation was for expulsion-related material damages and losses. I am especially interested in cases where expellees demanded redress for lost property which they had acquired in the context of “Aryanization”.
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