University Seminar “Europe Since COVID-19”

Hilary Silver

Professor of Sociology, International Affairs, and Public Policy and Public Administration

Sylvie Tissot is a professor of Political Science at University of Paris 8. Her research focuses on the intersection of class analysis and urban studies. Her previous book, Good Neighbors. Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End (Verso, 2015), reveals the ambivalent way in which upper-middle-class newcomers have positioned themselves as champions of diversity. She is also a founder of the collective Les Mots Sont Importants (Words Matter) and engages in debates on feminism, race, and religion. Her book Gayfriendly: Acceptance and Control of Homosexuality in New York and Paris is now out with Polity (2023).

Julian Wettengel is a staff Correspondent for Clean Energy Wire in Berlin, writing about climate and energy. He focuses on German efforts to transition to sustainable energy supplies. Mr. Wettengel has served as a parliamentary assistant to the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the European Parliament.

Peter S. Rashish is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Geoeconomics Program at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. He is an expert on German, European, and transatlantic trade, economic, and energy policies and has published widely in the media on these issues. Mr. Rashish has served as Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at the US Chamber of Commerce and has testified to Congress on the Eurozone and US-European economic relations. 

Samantha Gross is Director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Her work is focused on the intersection of energy, environment, and policy, including climate policy and international cooperation, energy geopolitics, and the global transition toward a decarbonized economy. Ms. Gross has served as director of the Office of International Climate and Clean Energy at the US Department of Energy. 

Dr. Tobias Lindner earned his doctorate in economics and has been a member of the Bundestag for the Greens since 2011. From 2017-2021, he was the Security Policy Spokesperson for the Alliance 90/Greens parliamentary group. In December 2021, he was appointed Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office. He is a member of the newly-formed taskforce of the Greens to examine the impact of the war in Ukraine on German politics and society.

Arthur Goldhammer is a writer, translator, and Senior Affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is the translator of more than 125 books from the French, for which he has received many honors. Among his translations are the major works of Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Piketty. He writes widely on French politics and culture and is the author of the novel Shooting War.

Philippe Marlière is a professor of French and European Politics at University College London (UK). He holds a Ph.D. degree in Social and Political Studies from the European University Institute in Florence. He was awarded the 2007 Chair of Politics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in recognition of his work on European social democracy. Philippe Marlière researches political ideologies, party politics and the French Left. He is currently writing a book on republican ideology in France.

Rim-Sarah Alouane is a French legal scholar. As a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Law at the University Toulouse-Capitole in France, her research focuses on religious freedom, civil liberties, constitutional law and human rights in Europe and North America. Ms. Alouane frequently appears on TV and radio in America and worldwide, including NPR, Al Jazeera, BBC, CBC, ABC Australia and France24 where she discusses discrimination, human rights violations and politics.

Mabel Berezin is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Europeans Studies at the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. She writes on challenges to democratic cohesion and solidarity in Europe and the United States. Berezin is the author of Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security, and Populism in the New Europe (Cambridge 2009) and Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Inter-war Italy (Cornell 1997). She is working on a manuscript The End of Security and the Rise of Populism under contract at Oxford University Press that examines the current global resurgence of nationalism and the populist challenge to democratic practice.

Giovanni Savino is Senior Lecturer in History at the School of Public Policy, RANEPA, Moscow. He has worked on nationalism and the far right in Russia and Italy, and he is known for his work on Russian–Italian far right connections. He teaches courses on the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of political thought and European history.

Tommaso Vitale is Associate Professor of Sociology and Scientific Director of the Master “Governing the Large Metropolis” at Sciences Po (Paris, France). He is also a researcher at Centre d’études européennes, a member of the Comité de direction of the Institut Convergences MIGRATIONS (CNRS), and is co-coordinator of the research group “Cities, borders and (im)mobility” of the CEE. He has published books and articles in comparative political sociology and in comparative urban sociology. His research focuses on racism, housing discrimination, anti-minority right wing mobilizations, islamophobia, metropolitan governance of social policies towards ethnic minorities in European Cities.

Hope M. Harrison, Professor of History & International Affairs at George Washington University, will be the US representative on a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)-sponsored international delegation observing the German elections. Dr. Harrison is an expert on post-1945 German history and is the author of books and articles on Germany.

Eric Langenbacher, Teaching Professor in the government department at Georgetown University and the director of the Society, Culture and Politics Program at the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins, will go to Germany with a group sponsored by the UK’s International Association for the Study of German Politics. Dr. Langenbacher is an expert on German politics and has published many articles and co-authored volumes on the subject.

Prof. Anna Triandafyllidou received her PhD from the European University Institute in 1995 and held teaching and research positions at the University of Surrey (1994-95), the London School of Economics (1995-97), the CNR in Rome (1997-99), the EUI (1999-2004) and the Democritus University of Thrace. She was a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at New York University in 2001, and a Colston Fellow at the University of Bristol (2001-2002). She serves as national expert in the OECD Network of International Migration Experts (formerly SOPEMI) and acts as an evaluator of research projects for the European Research Council, the Research Framework Programmes of the European Commission, the European Science Foundation, and several national ministries, research agencies and European and other universities. She has also worked as an evaluator for DG Home policies on migrant integration (2016-2018) and has been consulted by the European Parliament on high skill migration policy reform (2016).

Andrew Geddes is a Professor of Migration Studies and the Director of the Migration Policy Centre at European University Institute. During his career, he has led and participated in a number of major projects on aspects of international migration working with a wide range of academic and non-academic partners. For the period 2014-19 he was awarded an Advanced Investigator Grant by the European Research Council for a project on the drivers of global migration governance. He has published extensively on global migration, with a particular focus on policy-making and the politics of migration and on regional cooperation and integration. Recent publications include The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe (London: Sage, co-authored with Peter Scholten); The Dynamics of Regional Migration Governance (edited with Marcia Vera Espinoza, Leila Hadj-Abdou and Leiza Brumat) and A Rising Tide? The Salience of Immigration and the Rise of Anti-Immigration Political Parties in Western Europe (Political Quarterly, with James Dennison). Prior to joining EUI he was a Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK where he served as Head of Department between 2008 and 2011.

Christopher Warshaw is Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. He previously taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a Ph.D. and J.D. from Stanford University. Dr. Warshaw’s research evaluates the links between public opinion, elections, and political outcomes primarily in the United States. His work is published in American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and other top political science journals.

Hanne Beirens is Director of Migration Policy Institute Europe. She specializes in European Union policies related to asylum and migration, human trafficking, labor migration, and youth.

Prior to joining MPI as Associate Director in 2015, Dr. Beirens worked as a Lead Managing Consultant for ICF Consulting, where she focused on impact assessments, feasibility studies, and evaluations for the European Commission, with a particular focus on EU asylum and migration policy, as well as developing products within the European Migration Network (EMN), including pan-European studies and the EMN annual report. Topics covered include reception facilities for asylum seekers, unaccompanied children, and non-EU harmonized protection statuses. Earlier, Dr. Beirens worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Applied Social Studies of the University of Birmingham, evaluating services, organizations, and community-based initiatives pursuing the integration of asylum seekers, refugees, and third-country nationals. She also has worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and as an independent consultant for the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO). She holds a master’s degree in race and ethnic relations (with distinction) and a PhD in sociology and ethnic relations on the participation of minors in armed conflict, both from the University of Warwick (UK).

James F. Hollifield is Ora Nixon Arnold Chair in International Political Economy, Professor in the Department of Political Science, and Director of the Tower Center at SMU. He also is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a Fellow at the Institut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA) at the University of Bonn, and a Fellow at the Global Migration Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Hollifield has written widely on issues of political and economic development, with a focus on migration. His most recent books include Understanding Global Migration (Stanford University Press), Migration Theory, soon to be in its 4th edition with Routledge, and International Political Economy: History, Theory and Policy (Cambridge University Press). Hollifield has served as an advisor for governments around the world and for many international organizations on matters of migration and human and economic development.

Sinan Çankaya is assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration and Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. A writer and cultural anthropologist, he earned a Ph.D. on processes of in- and exclusion of ethnic minority police officers, and went on to research racial profiling. Previously, his journalistic writings were published each month at De Correspondent. His main research topics are racial profiling, race, racialization, diversity policies, and in/exclusion within organizations. He recently published a non-fiction book, My Innumerable Identities.

Noa K. Ha is acting scientific director at Deutsches Zentrum für Migrations- und Integrationsforschung (DeZIM). Previously, she taught and researched at TU Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin, and TU Dresden on such topics as postcolonial urbanism; memory politics and public space; and critical race, migration and integration studies. She is a founding member of the Critical Race, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies Association, and is active in such migrant and decolonial civil society organizations as Migrationsrat Berlin-Brandenburg e.V., korientation e.V. (an Asian German network), and Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA). She is co-editor of Street Vending in the Neoliberal City: A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy (Berghahn, 2015).

Sarah Mazouz is a tenured researcher at the CNRS (CERAPS). She holds a PhD in Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2010), was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and a postdoctoral fellow in the ERC research program MORALS – Towards a Critical Moral Anthropology. She is the author of La République et ses autres: Politiques de l’altérité dans la France des années 2000 (Lyon, ENS Éditions 2000) and Race (Anamos, 2020); co-author of Juger, réprimer, accompagner: Essai sur la morale de l’Etat (Seuil, 2013) and of At the Heart of State. The Moral World of Institutions (Pluto, 2015); and co-editor of Entre accueil et rejet: Ce que les villes font aux migrants (Le Passager clandestine, 2018).

Ojeaku Nwabuzo is Senior Research Officer at the European Network Against Racism where she is responsible for coordinating ENAR’s research and policy analysis, including yearly Shadow Reports on Racism in Europe. In recent years she has focused on policing and the criminal justice system. She is also a PhD candidate at VUB, where her doctoral research focuses on anti-racism advocacy and anti-discrimination policies in Europe. She previously worked as a research and policy analyst at Runnymede, a race equality think tank in the UK, where she supported a Deaths in Custody and mental health research project.

Jessica Pearson is Assistant Professor of European History at Macalester College. Her research explores the history of European decolonization from a global vantage point. In her first book, The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa, Dr. Pearson uses global public health as a lens to explore the clash between internationalism and imperialism in French Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. Currently, Professor Pearson is working on a new book project, entitled “Traveling to the End of Empire: Leisure Tourism in the Era of Decolonization,” which will be a global exploration of tourism and European decolonization in the second half of the twentieth century. She has conducted archival research in Aix-en-Provence, Dakar, London, Nantes, New York, Paris, and Washington D.C.

Aro Velmet is a historian of modern Europe, with a particular interest in the intersection of technological change and forms of governance, claims about humanitarian development, and global modeling. Dr. Velmet’s first book, Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, its Colonies and the World looks at how bacteriological research in the early twentieth century came to represent France’s civilizing mission in its colonies and shaped politics in the French empire in fields ranging from labor rights to industrial policy. Dr. Velmet is currently working on the history of cybernetics, data processing, and global development from an Eastern European perspective. Dr. Velmet also maintains an interest in public outreach. He is an editor of the Estonian cultural monthly Vikerkaar, a member of the Eurozine network of European cultural journals. In 2019-2020 he was a fellow at the DemocraCE project at the Res Publica Foundation in Poland.