Staff

Joseph Zeira is a professor of Economics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also has a part time position in LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. Joseph Zeira is a macroeconomist, who specializes in a number of areas: technology and economic growth, the role of income distribution in macroeconomics, money and liquidity, business cycles, and the economy of Israel.

In addition to academic research and teaching Joseph Zeira has been involved in a number of professional activities. Joseph Zeira is an active member of AIX, a group of Israeli, Palestinian, and Internationals, who study the economic aspects of potential peace agreements between Israel and Palestine. In 2011 Joseph Zeira headed a team of economists that supported the Israeli protest movement. In 2014 he was a member of a government committee for reducing poverty in Israel.

Professor Stefanie Middendorf, born in 1973, is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany, and appointed Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and the German Historical Institute in London for 2025/26. She is currently member of the steering committee of the excellence cluster project “Imaginamics” at the University of Jena and editor of the “Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte”. Stefanie Middendorf has studied History, Literature and Psychology in Freiburg, Basel and Jerusalem, holds a PhD in History from Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg and has received her post-doctoral qualification (“habilitation) from Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg in 2019.

Prof. David Shulman's research interest are Indian poetics, live Sanskrit theater, the Renascence in South India in the 16-17 centuries and the Islam in south India and the Carnatic classic music.ilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from temple myths and temple poems to essays that cover the wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India. Prof. Shulman is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at the University Bielefeld and the University of Bologna. She published many works on the theory of social systems, media theory, memory theory and sociology of financial markets. Her current research on algorithmic prediction is supported by a five-year Advanced Grant from the European Research Council.

Maria Mavroudi is Professor of Byzantine History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the contacts between Byzantium and the Arabs, the medieval reception of ancient Greek learning in the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds, and the history of Byzantine science.

Rahel Jaeggi is a Professor for Practical Philosophy and Social Philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She taught as a Theodor Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York during the academic year of 2015/16. Rahel Jaeggi’s research areas are in Social Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophical Anthropology, Social Ontology, Critical Theory and the enhancement of Critical Theory (in a broad sense).

Zur Shalev completed his studies at Princeton University (history, 2004). Since 2005/6 he teaches at the General History and Land of Israel Studies departments of the University of Haifa. He specialize in early modern European cultural and intellectual history, with particular interest in geographical and religious thought and Oriental scholarship. Currently he works on geographical Hebraism: an attempt to understand the reception of medieval geographical Hebrew texts in early modern Christian Europe. Another project is focused on the tradition of learned travel to the Levant in the 17th and 18th centuries, thereby tracing the real and perceived geographical boundaries of the European Republic of Letters. At the University of Haifa he convenes the Medieval-Renaissance seminar and runs the innovative teaching program Nofei Yeda (Landscapes of Knowledge).

Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology and Social Theory at Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany and Director of the Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt. He also is an Affiliated Professor at the Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, New York.