Research Fellows

2024-2025

Research Fellows

Dr. Idit Miller

Idit Miller is a sociologist and intergroup relations researcher. She obtained her BA from the Faculty of Judaism Studies in Bar-Ilan University. She got her MA in Labor Studies from Tel Aviv University with distinction and a PhD in sociology from the Faculty of Social Science of Ariel University. Her dissertation deals with "The effect of shared employment of Israeli-Jews and Non-Israeli Palestinians on mutual attitudes: Comparative research at Israeli Industry and Medicine workplaces". Throughout her academic studies, she won several awards and scholarships including the President's Scholarship for Excellence and Scientific Innovation of 2020 granted to her by the President of the State of Israel. This is one of the most prestigious doctoral awards in Israel. She was also awarded with a research grant for her doctoral research by ASMEA (the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa). Currently, she is an adjunct lecturer in the faculty of Social Science at Ariel University. Her fields of interest are organizational sociology, intergroup contact, inequality relations, social psychology, social identity, and conflict resolution.  Since 2022 she is part of a research team led by Prof. Sabar and Dr. Babis on "onward migration, cultural capital and resettlement: comparing trajectories of naturalized immigrants (“Olim”), labour migrants and asylum seekers from Israel to Canada".

Dr. Lisa Richlen

Between 2000-2021, Richlen worked for tens of social change and human rights organizations in Israel with a focus non-Jews including asylum seekers. Richlen has volunteered for refugee-serving agencies in East Africa and served as a board member of such organizations in both Israel and Vancouver. In 2021, Richlen completed a PhD at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in the Department of Politics and Government with a degree in African Studies. Her PhD research, which builds on relationships stretching back to 2007, focused on Sudanese community organizations in Israel. She then completed a post-doc through the Kreitman School for Advance Graduate Studies at Ben Gurion University in the Negev and received the ‘Machar’ award for outstanding student article from the same university. To date, she has published four solo-authored articles on this research in high ranking peer reviewed journals. She has also co-authored a book chapter for publication in an edited volume and is currently in the process of co-authoring an article which is a comparative study of Sudanese refugees in Israel and Jordan. Her research is also informed by her own experience as a migrant – first from the United States to Israel in 2000 and, since September 2021, to Canada. She is currently working as a lecturer in various institutions of higher education in the greater Vancouver area (including the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University) and is a researcher on a project examining onward migration via Israel to Canada.

Dr. Aviv Cohen

Dr. Aviv Cohen received his Ph.D. from the Sverdlin Institute for Latin American History and Culture, The School of History, Tel Aviv University. His thesis Fire in the Backyard, dealt with the US and the American Press when facing the revolutionary ferment in the Caribbean Basin during the Cold War Years. His research focuses on two state case studies from the Caribbean basin, in which the events exceeded beyond the local event level and have left their impression on the history of the area – Guatemala during the presidency years of Juan Jose Arevalo 1945-1954 and the revolution in Cuba between the years 1953-1961. The research relies primarily on the triangle relationship between the revolutionary states, the US government and the US and international media, especially the printed press. The Dissertation was written under the supervision of Prof. Raanan Rein. Aviv's broader historical interests are international revolutions, press effect on historical events and protest groups in the modern world.

Professor Limore Yagil

Limore Yagil is a professor habilitate (H.D.R: National Diploma to direct Research) in Paris-Iv-Sorbonne university (Centre Roland -Mousnier CNRS-UMR 8596) and also professor fellow in the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institut of Holocaust, Bar -Ilan -University, Israel and  at the Heschel Center for Christian and Jews Relations in the Lublin Catholic University, Poland. She received is Ph.D in 1992 from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and his Habilitation to direct research  from the Sorbonne University  in 2010. She was a research fellow at Yad-Vashem, Jerusalem, (1998-1999), and at the United States Holocaust Research Center  Washington D.C, U.S.A (2002-2003), and  at Sorbonne University Paris 3 and Paris 4 (2005-2010),  

She has published  about ten books concerning  the modalities of Rescue of Jews in France 1940-1944 and civil disobedience. Among her books: Des Catholiques au secours des Juifs sous l’Occupation, (Bayard, 2022) ; Les «anonymes » de la Résistance en France 1940-1942 : motivations et engagements de la première heure,  (SPM 2019) ; Au nom de l’Art : 1933-1945 : exils, solidarités, et engagements, (Fayard 2015) ; Jean Bichelonne un polytechnicien sous Vichy: entre mémoire et histoire, (SPM 2015) ; La France terre de refuge et de désobéissance civile 1936-1944 : sauvetage des Juifs, (Cerf 2010-2011, 3 vol), L’Homme Nouveau et la révolution nationale de Vichy 1940-1944, (PUL 1997).

Dr. Paulina D. Dominik

Paulina D. Dominik is a historian of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, focusing on the connected histories of Central-Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mediterranean. Her research interests include the history of imperialism and nationalism, the history of migration, intellectual and cultural history, and the history of Orientalism.

Her first monograph (in preparation) titled Poland and the Middle East during the Age of Empire: A Global Biography of Seyfeddin Thadée Gasztowtt examines the emergence and dissemination of anti-imperial discourses and critiques of a Eurocentric world order. It explores the cross-cultural transfer of ideas between Central-Eastern Europe and the Middle East during the age of high imperialism through the biography of Seyfeddin Thadée Gasztowtt (1881-1936) - a Polish-French travelling activist who tied the issue of Polish independence to the Ottoman Empire and more broadly, to the Muslim world and Asia.

As a Dan David Fellow at TAU, Paulina will develop her postdoctoral project From freedom fighters to agents of empire(s)?: Central-Eastern European mobilities and transnational workings of empire in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Mediterranean. Focusing on the political émigrés from former Poland-Lithuania, this project examines Polish imperial thought, (trans-)imperial agency and the practices of informal imperialism in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Mediterranean, and seeks to investigate the complex attitudes of historical actors from Central-Eastern Europe towards imperialism, colonialism and Orientalism.

Before joining Tel Aviv University, Paulina was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She earned her PhD degree from the Free University of Berlin, where she was a doctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History. Prior to that, she received an MA (Oxon) and an MSt in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford.

Dr. Hannah Erlwein

Hannah Erlwein, PhD, is an intellectual historian of the premodern Islamic tradition, focusing in particular on the sciences of kalam (rational theology) and falsafa (philosophy). In her PhD thesis (SOAS University of London 2016, published by De Gruyter 2019) entitled Arguments for the Existence of God in Classical Islamic Thought: A Re-appraisal of Perspectives and Discourses, she offers a new reading of the premodern Islamic discourse on arguments for the creator, which brings actors’ categories and frameworks to the fore. She is currently working on her second monograph, which traces debates about analogical reasoning in science among premodern Islamic thinkers. Hannah has conducted postdoctoral research in research groups at LMU Munich (2017-2019) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (2019-2024). She currently teaches at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at TAU.