2009-2010 International Visitors

The following people visited the Brandeis campus during the 2009-2010 academic year:

Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Professor of Non-Western Studies

Visiting Scholars

Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Professor of Non-Western Studies

Marysa Navarro Aranguren (Latin American and Latin(o) Studies)
Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Professor, 2009-10
Argentina

Dr. Navarro is the Charles Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth College where she has taught Latin American history, women’s history, and women’s studies since 1968. She has authored or co-authored numerous books and articles on Argentine history (including a study of Eva Perón and Peronism), Brazilian history, general Latin American history, Latin American feminism, and women’s history. She was elected President of the Latin American Studies Association in 2003. (Learn more about Marysa Navarro Aranguren)

At Brandeis, she taught the following course in Spring 2010:

  • HIST 175A: Topics in Latin American History

Visiting Scholars

Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch (Politics)
Schusterman Center for Israel Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, 2009-10

The Schusterman Center's postdoctoral fellow, Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, comes from the Political Science departments of MIT and Harvard. She earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and wrote her dissertation on And the Truth Shall Make You Free: The International Norm of Truth-Seeking.

At Brandeis, she will be teaching the following courses:

  • POL  142A: U.S.-Israeli Relations: Interests, Values, Lobbies, and the "Special Relationship"
  • POL 133B: Transitional Justice and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Yoram Bilu (Anthropology)
Schusterman Center for Israel Studies Visiting Faculty, 2009-10

Dr. Bilu holds a joint appointment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Department of Psychology, where he is the Sylvia Bauman Professor, and in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. A clinical psychologist turned anthropologist, he is interested in the interface of culture and psychology as reflected in mental health, folk-religion, and altered states of consciousness. He received the Bahat Prize for his book, The Saint Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers, and Holy Men in Israel’s Urban Periphery, Haifa University Press (2005).

At Brandeis he will be teaching the following courses in Fall 2009:

  •  The Sanctification of Space in Contemporary Israel
  •  Culture and Mental Illness

Maoz Azaryahu (Anthropology)
Schusterman Center for Israel Studies Visiting Faculty, 2009-10

Dr. Azaryahu is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Haifa. He has written extensively on urban landscapes, memory, and society, and has recently published Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (2006). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Penn State University, and at Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada.

At Brandeis he will be teaching the following courses in Spring 2010:

  • ANTH 175B: Space, Memory and History
  • ANTH 176B: Mythic Tel Aviv

Gannit Ankori (Art History)
Schusterman Center for Israel Studies Visiting Faculty, 2009-10

Gannit Ankori is the Henya Sharef Professor of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before coming to Brandeis she served as chair of the Department of Art History at Hebrew University. She has been a visiting scholar and associate professor at Harvard University and a visiting associate professor at Tufts University/ School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She has published two books and numerous articles on Frida Kahlo (e.g. Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation, 2002) and curated the acclaimed museum exhibition Frida Kahlo’s Intimate Family Picture. She has taught and lectured about Israeli and Palestinian art for many years and has published extensively on the visual representation of gender-related issues, the construction of identity, exile, trauma, and hybridity. Her book, Palestinian Art, was published by Reaktion Books, London, in 2006 and is distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press. She won a Polonsky Prize for Originality and Creativity in the Humanistic Disciplines for this publication. Her forthcoming English-language book, Frida Kahlo, will be published as part of the prestigious Critical Lives series by Reaktion Books in London.

At Brandeis she will be teaching the following courses in Spring 2010:

  • FA 153A: Israeli Art
  • FA  154B:  Art and Trauma: Israeli, Palestinian, Latin American and United States Art

Jambalmaa Khainzan
Visiting Research Associate in the Scholars Program of the Women's Studies Research Center

 Jambalmaa Khainzan was born and raised in Mongolia, and has an MD from Irkutsk Medical University, in Russia.  She worked with the Mongolian government in food safety, nutrition and water and sanitation programs.  In 2002-06, she was a country project coordinator for the Asian Development Bank Project “Improving Nutrition for poor mothers and children in Central Asia and Mongolia,” a micronutrient initiative in fortified flour and iodized salt and worked as program manager in project development, planning and implementation, monitoring, and evaluation indicator analysis.  Her scientific research includes food safety, nutrition education, micronutrients, prevention of food-borne diseases, risk management, and food quality assurance and she has presented at the 5th World Congress on Foodborne Infections and Intoxications, Berlin, 2004.  After working in the public health sector and a Ph.D. in food safety (1996), she returned to graduate school for more skills, with an M.S. degree in International Health Policy and Management at Brandeis and an M.A. in humanitarian assistance at Tufts. Her realization that policy advocacy and behavior change are the most important ways to change trends, has made this her focus for the health of women and children in remote areas of the world.


Dr. Khainzan's current research is a woman-centered food safety and nutrition model for developing countries, based on analysis of women’s “life contact points” in the food production, processing, storage, and preparation of common foods. A “Women and Safe Food” exhibition intends to raise food safety and nutrition awareness in remote areas of Mongolia, Nepal, and Kazakhstan, to prevent maternal and childhood death from food-borne diseases.

Renana Leviani, Novelist
Hadassah Brandeis Institute Scholar-in-Residence: September-December, 2009

Renana Leviani is a student in the Department of Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University in the Doctoral Fellowship of Excellence program where she is working on her dissertation. Using a feminist perspective, Renana is examining the moral status of prostitution—particularly claims that would allow the practice on the basis of women's autonomy. Renana received her Masters in Educational Administration and Leadership from Tel Aviv University. An advocate for human rights, Renana produces, edits and hosts a radio program devoted to the topic for Kol HaShalom station in Jerusalem.

Renana Leviani is the Hadassah Brandeis Institute's first Fulbright-HBI Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship scholar.


Keiko Shirakawa (English and American Literature)
Visiting Fulbright Scholar in the Department of English and American Literature

Keiko Shirakawa received her Ph.D. from Keio University, Tokyo in 2003. She is currently an associate professor at Doshisha University in Japan. She is an authority on American popular culture. While at Brandeis, she conducting research on the great seal of the United States, with its bald eagle, and on the importance in American iconography of Sacagewea, the Shosone woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their exploration of the West. She is taking courses on eighteenth and nineteenth American literature.

Stefanie Landmann (English and American Literature)
Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of English and American Literature

Stefanie Landmann is a Ph.D student at Heinrich-Heine University (American Literature) where her dissertation focused on 'A Redefinition of the Human in Ecocritical American Literature of the 20th Century'. She has also been a lecturer at the Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf where she taught an Undergraduate Seminar in 19th Century American Nature Writing.

Her research at Brandeis focuses on the relationship humans have with the environment in the present, particularly where we place ourselves in relation to the environment, and the poetry of Mary Oliver.