Participant Bios

Giuliano Amato is the President of the Constitutional Court of Italy, since January 2022. He served as Secretary of the Treasury in Italy and was the Italian Prime Minister in 1992-93 and in 2000-01. From 2006 to 2008 he served as the Minister of the Interior. He was the vice-chairman of the Convention for the European Constitution. He has chaired the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani and the Centro Studi Americani (Center for American Studies) in Rome. A Professor of Law in several Italian universities and abroad, he has written books and articles on the economy and public institutions, European antitrust, personal liberties, comparative government, European integration and humanities. He served as the Chair of Reset DOC’s scientific board from 2003 to 2013.

Lisa Anderson is Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations Emerita at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

Dr. Anderson served as President of the American University in Cairo for five years, from 2011-2016. She is Dean Emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she led the school from 1997-2007 prior to her appointment as Dean, she served as Chair of the Political Science Department and Director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute; she held the Shotwell Chair in the Political Science Department.  She has also taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and in the Government and Social Studies departments at Harvard University.

Dr. Anderson’s scholarly research has included work on state formation in the Middle East and North Africa; on regime change and democratization in developing countries; and on social science, academic research and public policy both in the United States and around the world. Among her books are The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980 (1986) and Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century (2003); she has also published numerous scholarly articles.

Dr. Anderson is a trustee of the Aga Khan University, Tufts University and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She is a member emerita of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, served as elected President of the Middle East Studies Association, and as Chair of the Board of the Social Science Research Council.  A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, she has received honorary degrees from Monmouth University and the American University in Paris.

Stefano Beggiora

Akeel Bilgrami got a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He has been the Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities as well as the South Asian Institute at Columbia.  His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014).  He is due to publish two in the near future: What is a Muslim? (Princeton University Press) and Gandhi’s Integrity (Columbia University Press). His long-term future work is on the relations between agency, value, and practical reason.

Giancarlo Bosetti is the Executive Chair and one of the founders of Reset DOC and Reset, a cultural magazine he founded in 1993. He was vice-editor-in-chief of the Italian daily L’Unità. He is the editor-in-chief of the web-magazine of Resetdoc.org. He is currently contributing to the Italian daily La Repubblica and he has been teaching sociology of communication at University La Sapienza and University Roma Tre. He published La lezione di questo secolo, a book-interview with Karl Popper; Cattiva maestra televisione (ed.), writings by Karl Popper and others. Among his other books: Spin. Trucchi e Tele-imbrogli della Politica, Marsilio, 2007; Il fallimento dei laici furiosi (2009); La verità degli altri. La scoperta del pluralismo in dieci storie, Bollati Boringhieri, 2020.

Daniele Brombal is Associate Professor at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on China’s policy making processes and public participation in the fields of sustainability, environmental protection, and public health. Between 2007 and 2010, he was Research Consultant and Programme Officer at the Directorate General for Development Cooperation – Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy (Embassy of Italy in Beijing). He was 2009 Fellow of the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UN/DESA). Between 2012 and 2015, he was visiting fellow of the EU FP-7 Marie Curie IRSES project ‘Global Partners in Contaminated Land Management’ (GLOCOM) at the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences (CRAES) and Beijing Normal University (BNU). Between July, 2012 and March, 2014 he was Project Manager at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC). From 2013 to 2015, he was Member of the Board of the international NGO Asia Onlus. His works are published on Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Land Use Policy, Journal of Cleaner Production, Health Research Policy and Systems, International Journal for Equity in Health.

Marina Calloni is full professor and chair of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Milan-Bicocca in Milan (PhD. in Philosophy and PhD. in Social and Political Science). She worked abroad for almost twenty years, teaching (among others in Bremen, Vienna, Lugano, Hannover, Kurume, University of Notre Dame) and giving lectures in several (48) countries, participating in numerous cross-border researches (also at the Italian Academy – Columbia University) and collaborating with supranational institutions (UNDP, UNESCO, UNHCR, European Union, Council of Europe). She is delegate of the Minister of University and Research, Cristina Messa, for the prevention of any form of discrimination, and consultant for the “Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Femicide” at the Senate of the Republic. She is directing the academic network UNIRE in collaboration with the Council of Europe for the application of the Istanbul Convention. She was member of the “Committee of experts in economic and social matters” (Comitato Colao), a special task force to handle the ‘Phase 2’ of the emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic. She is deputy president of the Italian Society of Political Philosophy (SIFP). She has published in several languages over 260 scientific works and numerous articles in newspapers on the topics of social philosophy and political theory; human rights and fundamental freedoms; gender issues; critical theory of society; critique of violence; citizenship and the public sphere; research networks and international cooperation. In 2020 the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, conferred her the honorary title of “Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic”.
For further information: https://www.unimib.it/marina-calloni   

Marta Craveri is the Director of the Office for International Affairs at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme in Paris. As a specialist on Soviet Russia, she also co-authored a book on the destalinization of Russia and resistance in the Gulags, published in 2003 with Anne-Mari Losonczy.

Silvio Cristiano is a qualified civil and environmental engineer. PhD cum laude in Architecture, City, and Design. As of early 2022, Adjunct professor of Environmental Politics and Post-Doc Research Fellow in Ecology And Urban and Regional Planning (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), Research Collaborator in Regional Planning (Università di Udine), Adjunct professor of Regional Planning (Università di Padova), Visiting professor of Environmental accounting and societal metabolic indicators (Università di Torino), and Educational collaborator in Architecture, Territory, and Society (Politecnico di Torino). He crossdisciplinarily deals with integrated sustainability and resilience. Through systems thinking, he explores ecology, society, and their material/immaterial nexi, with a focus on their spatial implications. He has addressed civil works, urban and regional systems, energy issues, food systems, healthcare facilities, development issues, and North-South relations. He has a professional and academic record of international cooperation and exchange projects with Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the rest of Europe, professional and teaching experience with institutions from Europe, China, and North America. Invited keynote speaking, chairing, scientific advisory, and organisational roles at international conferences and symposia. Parallel to this, he has been engaged in civil society in Rome, Venice, and in supralocal contexts, learning a lot and bringing his skills and interest in the above-mentioned matters and beyond.

Alessandro Ferrara is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and teaches Legal Theory at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. He has served as President of the Italian Society for Political Philosophy (2005-2010) and is Co-Director of the Prague Conference on Philosophy and Social Science.

Among his recent volumes are: with Frank Michelman, Legitimation by Constitution. A Dialogue on Political Liberalism (OUP, 2021); Rousseau and Critical Theory (Brill, 2017) and The Democratic Horizon. Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism (CUP, 2014). He is also the author of “Unconventional Adaptation and the Authenticity of the Constitution”, in R.Albert, Revolutionary Constitutionalism (Hart 2020), and has widely published on judgment and exemplarity as sources of normativity, critical theory, religion in a post-secular society and on the Rawlsian paradigm of political liberalism. Within that paradigm, he has a forthcoming volume entitled Sovereignty Across Generations. Constituent Power and Political Liberalism (OUP 2023) on the opposition of sequential and serial conceptions of democratic popular sovereignty.

Beatrice Gallelli is a reseacher at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), where she works on projects pertaining to Asia, and specifically the People’s Republic of China, China’s foreign policy Italy-China relations and Europe-China relations. She is Fixed-Term Assistant Professor at Ca’ Foscari University, where she teaches Chinese language and translation. She obtained her Ph.D. cum laude from Ca’ Foscari University in 2019, and she has been a visiting research fellow at the School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University. She is currently part of the Sinophone Borderlands Survey research group, aiming at analysing China’s perception in Europe. She is the author of La Cina di oggi in otto parole (Il Mulino, 2021) and “From a Story of Disaster to a Story of Victory: Chinese Media Reports in the COVID-19 Crisis”, in Media Narratives during the Corona Pandemic. The Asian Experience, edited by Shubhda Arora and Keval J. Kumar (Routledge, forthcoming) written together with Runya Qiaoan (Palacký University).

Seán Golden is a Retired Full Professor, former Dean and former Director of the East Asia Studies & Research Centre of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He is Senior Associate Researcher of the CIDOB Barcelona Centre for International Affairs and former Associate Professor of the Barcelona Institute for International Studies (IBEI). He taught at the University of Connecticut (USA), Notre Dame University (USA) and Tianjin International Studies University (PRC), has been a visiting professor at Università Ca’Foscari Venezia (Italy) and Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal), and a visiting researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A specialist in Chinese thought, politics, and international relations, he is the author of numerous publications in East Asian Studies as well as translations of classical and contemporary Chinese literature and thought.

Amel Grami is a Tunisian Islamologist, professor of ‘Gender Studies’ at the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Human Sciences of the University de la Manouba in Tunisia. She is a member of the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL), which is part of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) for Women’s Rights, Peace & Security (founded in 2006). She was awarded the Ordre de la République by President Béji Essebsi on 13 August 2016, on the occasion of National Women’s Day. Among her publications we may mention her study on apostasy in modern Islamic thought, published in Arabic in 2006, and subsequently translated into English and French: Apostasy in Contemporary Islamic Thought, Cenatra, Tunis 2014; L’apostasie dans la pensée islamique moderne, Nirvana, Tunis 2017. Professor Grami is also the author of an important study on gender difference in Arab-Muslim culture, published in Arabic in 2006, and of another gender study on on women and terrorism, in collaboration with Monia Arfaoui, released in 2017.

Mona Harb is a Non-resident Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC (ACW), and Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut, where she is also co-founder and research lead at the MSFEA Beirut Urban Lab. Her ongoing research investigates matters of governance in contexts of limited statehood, forced displacement, configurations of public life in contested cities, and intersections of urban activism and oppositional politics. She received her PhD in Political Science from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques at Aix-Marseille (France). She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth (1985-2005): de la banlieue à la ville (Karthala-IFPO, 2010), co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013, with Lara Deeb,), co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (Beirut: LCPS, 2015, with Sami Atallah), and author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other publications. Harb serves on the editorial boards of IJMES, Environment and Planning C, IJURR, and CSSAME and is a trustee of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. She is a co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine.

Volker Kaul is senior research fellow in the ERC CZ project “Identity Constitutionalism: The Community-Building Capacity of Constitutions in the EU and MENA Region” at the Center for Comparative Law of Charles University in Prague. Moreover, he coordinates the research area “East–West Dialogues” for the foundation Reset–Dialogues on Civilizations. Previously, he held research and teaching positions at LUISS University, the Italian National Research Council (CNR), University of Salerno as well as CEA Rome Center and was visiting scholar at Columbia University. He earned a double degree in political and social sciences from Freie Universität Berlin and Sciences Po Paris and a Ph.D. in political theory from LUISS University in Rome. His research focuses on social identities, with a special focus on the Arab and Muslim world. In 2020, he completed the monograph Identity and the Difficulty of Emancipation for Springer (currently translated into Arabic for the publisher Maysaloon). In 2016, he published together with Seyla Benhabib Toward New Democratic Imaginaries – Istanbul Seminars on Islam, Culture and Politics for Springer. He edited two further books: one with Ananya Vajpeyi on Populism and Minorities – Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe(2020) for Springer and another with Ingrid Salvatore on What is Pluralism? (2020) for Routledge. Since 2010, he has been co-editing a yearly special issue of the journal Philosophy & Social Criticism on issues related to culture, religionnand politics.

Jonathan Laurence is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College. His principal areas of teaching and research are comparative politics and religion and politics in Western Europe, Turkey and North Africa. He is a former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, Wissenchaftszentrum Berlin, Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund, Fafo Institute/Norwegian Research Council, LUISS University-Rome, Sciences Po-Paris and the Brookings Institution. Dr. Laurence’s most publication is Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism and the Modern State with Princeton University Press in 2021. Jonathan Laurence is also the Executive Director of Reset Dialogues US.

Tiziana Lippiello is the first female president of Ca’ Foscari University and Professor of Classical Chinese, Religions, and Philosophy of China at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University. She is also member of the advisory board of Reset DOC. She has been Head of the Department of Asian and North African Studies (2011- 2014) and Head of the Department of East Asian Studies (2009- 2011) at Ca’ Foscari University. Amongst other she published the book Il confucianesimo (2010) and Auspicious Omens and Miracles in Ancient China. Han, Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties (2001) and “Why was Shen Yue so Fond of Auspicious Signs” in S. Katz, “Divination and the Strange” (forthcoming). Professor Lippiello is also Director of the Series La fenice, Classici cinesi, Marsilio Editore Venezia, Director of the Series Sinica venetiana, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari and in the Academic Board of the Collegio Internazionale Ca’ Foscari. She is also Coordinator of the Project RobinBA (The Role of books in non-bibliometric areas), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Macerata University, University of South Brittany, sponsored by ANVUR.

Stephen Macedo writes and teaches on political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism, democracy and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, and the family and sexuality. He is author of Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage (Princeton University Press, 2015).  He is currently writing a book on justice and migration. From 2001-2009, he was Director of the University Center for Human Values. As founding director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs (1999-2001), he chaired the Princeton Project on Universal Jurisdictionand edited Universal Jurisdiction: International Courts and the Prosecution of Serious Crimes Under International Law (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). As vice president of the American Political Science Association he was first chair of its standing committee on Civic Education and Engagement and principal co-author of Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation, and What We Can Do About It (Brookings, 2005). His other books include Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Harvard U. Press, 2000); and Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford U. Press, 1990).

He is co-author and co-editor of American Constitutional Interpretation, with W. F. Murphy, J. E. Fleming, and S. A. Barber (Foundation Press, 6th edition 2018).He is current President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, which publishes the annual NOMOS volumes, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.

Walter D Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature, at Duke University. he is also the Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. He received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris.  He has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and has in the past years been working on different aspects of the modern/colonial world and exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality.

His publications on these topics include:  The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (1995, the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize from the Modern Languages Association) and The Idea of Latin America, 2005) (Frantz Fanon Prize by the Caribbean; Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking 2000). Co-author with Catherine Walsh of On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (2018) and The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021). He is editor and co-editor of Capitalismo y geopolítica del conocimiento: El eurocentrismo y la filosofía de la liberación en el debate intelectual contemporanáneo (2000) and The Americas: Loci of Enunciations and Imaginary Constructions (1994-95). His works have been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Estonian, Polish, Spanish, French,  German, Portuguese, Swedish, Rumanian, Italian and Turkish.

Prof. em. Subrata K. Mitra, Ph.D. (Rochester), is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany and an Adjunct Professor at Dublin City University (DCU), Dublin, Ireland. Comparative politics, rational choice, governance, citizenship, political theory, foreign policy and South Asian Studies are among his main interests. He held the chair of Political Science at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, 1994-2014, and subsequently, was Visiting Research Professor, and, Director of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University Singapore. His books include India’s Parliamentary Elections of 2019: Democracy at the Crossroads? (Delhi: Routledge; forthcoming 2022), Governance by Stealth: the Ministry of Home Affairs and making of the Indian state (Delhi: Oxford University Press; 2021), Power, Protest and Participation (London: Routledge; 2021, [1992]), Politics in India: Structure, Process, Policy (London: Routledge, 2017, second edition); Kautilya’s Arthashastra: An Intellectual Biography – the Classical Roots of Modern Politics in India (Delhi: Rupa; 2017); Citizenship as Cultural Flow: Structure, Agency and Power (Heidelberg: Springer:2013); Reuse: The Art and Politics of Integration and Anxiety (Delhi: Sage; 2012); When Rebels become Stakeholders (Delhi: Sage; 2009); The Puzzle of India’s Governance (London: Routledge; 2005). Journals in which he has published include World Politics, West European Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Comparative Studies in Society and Politics, International Political Science Review, American Political Science Review, Contemporary South Asia, India Review, Asian Journal of Political Science, Indian Journal of Political Science, and The Economic and Political Weekly of India.

Toshio Miyake is currently an associate professor in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He was born in Kyoto in Japan. After attending schools in Germany and Italy, he graduated in Japanese studies at the Ca ‘Foscari University of Venice (1997), and then specialized in sociology, media studies and cultural studies at the University of Osaka and Ritsumeikan in Kyoto (MA 2000) and in Japanese literature at Ca ‘Foscari (PhD 2005). He has taught Japanese culture, society and language in various Italian universities (Venice, Urbino, Perugia, Calabria, 2003-08) and conducted field research in Japan on popular cultures (youth and manga subcultures) and on representations of Italy in as postdoc fellow at Kyoto University and ICU, Tokyo (2008-10). He returns to Venice as the first Ca ‘Foscari winner of a European Marie Curie International Incoming project (2011-13) and receives the Ca’ Foscari Research Award (Youth category 2013). Since 2015 he is associate professor at the Ca ‘Foscari University of Venice. He has collaborated on international inter-disciplinary research projects (sociology, anthropology, intellectual history, area studies) with the University of Kyoto, the University of Kobe and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken). His research concerns the critical review of the notions of ‘West’ / ‘East’ and whiteness / yellow, as well as their hegemonic role in the historical-cultural relations between Italy (Europe) and Japan (Asia).

Philip Pettit is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, and Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2017. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2010 and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2013; he has long been a fellow of the Australian academies in Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds honorary professorships in Philosophy at Sydney University and Queen’s University, Belfast and has been awarded honorary degrees by the National University of Ireland (Dublin), the University of Crete, Lund University, Universite de Montreal, Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Athens.

He works in moral and political theory and on background issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. His recent single-authored books include  On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (CUP 2012);  Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (W.W.Norton 2014) and The Robust Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue and Respect (OUP 2015). His recent co-authored books include  A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero’s Spain (PUP 2010), with Jose Marti; and Group Agency: The Possibility, Design and Status of Corporate Agents (OUP 2011), with Christian List. He gave the Tanner lectures on Human Values at Berkeley in April 2015, which appeared in late 2018 with OUP, New York (with commentary by Michael Tomasello) as The Birth of Ethics: A Reconstruction of the Nature and Role of Morality.  He  presented the Locke lectures in Philosophy at Oxford University in Spring 2019.

Maria Cristina Paciello is a researcher at the Department of Asian and Mediterranean African Studies. She received the National Scientific Qualification of the MIUR as associate professor in the competitive sectors 11 / B1 (Geography) and 10 / N1 (Cultures of the Ancient Near East, the Middle East and Africa). For more than twenty years, she has passionately devoted herself to the study of the political economy of the Arab world. Her main research interests concern the issue of labor in the context of neoliberal reforms. After graduating in Arabic, she continued her education by earning a master’s in development studies from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and a doctorate in developing country economics and politics from the Department of Economic Studies of the University of Florence. She has carried out research activities in Arab countries and for various international institutes and agencies of the United Nations. She was scientific coordinator of the POWER2YOUTH European project funded by the 7th Framework Program and of the Horizon 2020 MEDRESET project at the Istituto Affari Internazionali. Alongside intense research activity, she has multi-year teaching experience at the Ca ‘Foscari University of Venice, the La Sapienza University of Rome, the American University of Rome (AUR) and other universities.

Runya Qiaoan is assistant professor and senior researcher at Palacky University and analyst at CEIAS. Runya’s research focuses on civil society and social governance. Her recent publications include a paper on Graduated Control 2.0 in China and a paper on China-US blame game. Her most recent book, Civil Society in China – How Society Speaks to the State, was published by Routledge in 2021.

David Rasmussen is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and Honorary President of the Center for Ethics and Global Politics of LUISS University. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Istanbul Seminars His fields of interest are contemporary continental philosophy, social and political philosophy. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Social Criticism. His books include: Reading Habermas; Universalism vs. Communitarianism in Ethics; Handbook of Critical Theory; Jürgen Habermas: The Foundations of the Habermas Project; Jürgen Habermas: Law and Politics; Jürgen Habermas: Ethics; Jürgen Habermas: Epistemology and Truth; Critical Theory Vol. I-IV. He is currently preparing a book on John Rawls..

Marcella Simoni is researcher and lecturer at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she teaches History of the Middle East and History of Contemporary Jewry. She has a twelve-year consistent record of publications, lecturing and active conference participation addressing various aspects of contemporary history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with special reference to peace-building and civil society cooperation. She has brought to light new perspectives of investigation on the factors of ‘the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, focussing on the complex interaction between education, medicine and (public) health, gender, youth, family, diasporas, collective trauma, civil society and associationism. Aside from numerous articles, in 2021 she curated the volume, The Languages of Discrimination and Racism in Italy in the 20th century. History, Legacies and Practices (1900-2020) Her book, Israelis and Palestinians seeking, building and representing peace was published in 2013.

Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her recent publications include, The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar (Verso 2019), which has been translated into Gujarati, Tamil and Telugu; and four edited volumes, Reading India: Selections from Economic and Political Weekly 1991-2017 (co-edited, Orient Blackswan, 2019); The Scheduled Tribes and their India (OUP, 2016); Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development (co-edited, Sage 2014); and Inequality and Social Mobility in Post-Reform India, Special Issue of Contemporary South Asia (co-edited, 2016), as well as journal articles on democracy, authoritarianism and academic freedom.  She was awarded the M.N. Srinivas Memorial Prize, 2003, the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences (Social Anthropology) in 2010, the Ester Boserup Prize for Development Research, 2016 and the Malcolm Adiseshiah Prize for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, 2017.

Yael Tamir is President of Beit Berl College since October 2020. From 2010 to 2020, she was president of Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. She was a deputy speaker of the Knesset and served as Israel’s Minister of Immigration (1999-2001) and Minister of Education (2006-2009). Tamir received her BA and MA from the Hebrew University (Cum Laude), and her Ph.D. in political philosophy from Oxford University where she worked under the supervision of Sir Isaiah Berlin. She was a professor at Tel-Aviv University and a visiting professor and a scholar-in-residence at: Princeton, Harvard, The University of Pennsylvania, the Central European University in Budapest and New York University.

Tamir is the author of Liberal-Nationalism (Princeton University Press) Rethinking Education, and Who is Afraid of Equality: on Society the Education in Israel (in Hebrew), as well as of numerous articles in the fields of moral and political philosophy, philosophy of education, feminism and human rights. She is the editor of Democratic Education in a Multicultural State (Blackwell) and, Moral and Political Education with Professor Macedo (New York University Press).

Professor Tamir is a founding member of the Israeli peace movement “Peace Now” and served as the chairperson of the Israeli Association of Civil Rights.

Francesca Tarocco obtained her PhD in Chinese History and Buddhist Studies at SOAS, University of London. She was a Leverhulme Fellow and Lecturer in Buddhist Studies at the University of Manchester and an Associate Professor of Buddhist Cultures and affiliated faculty of the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai. She is the author of The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism, Routledge 2011 [2008], and of the forthcoming Altar Modern: Buddhism and technology in Modern China.  She has published, among other topics, on media and visual culture, materiality, sacred space, and the genealogy of the term religion in China and East Asia. She recently edited the special issue “Buddhists and the Making of Modern Chinese Societies” for the Journal of Global Buddhism (2017) and serves as China editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Tarocco is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies (China) at Cà Foscari University of Venice and a Visiting Associate Professor of Buddhist Cultures at NYU Shanghai.

Richard Quang-Anh Tran is assistant professor at the Department of Asian and North African Studies of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he teaches Vietnamese Language and Literature of Southeast Asia. He holds a Ph.D in Rhetoric Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. From 2012-2014, he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies of the National University of Singapore. In 2012, he was a visiting scholar at the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkley, and later, from 2016-2017, at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.  His teaching and research interests include Southeast Asian Studies, Vietnamese Cultural History of the 19th and 20th centuries, LGBT Studies, Queer Historiography and Critical Theory. His recent manuscript Queer Vietnam: A History of Gender in the early Twentieth Century, 1920-1945 is under contract with Stanford University Press.  He is presently working on another project tracing the genealogy of the idea of the “human” in Vietnamese intellectual thought from the period of French colonialism to the post-World War II era of international human rights norms. He is an executive board member and officer of the Vietnam Studies Group of the Association for Asian Studies.

Ananya Vajpeyi is a scholar of history, literature, philology and political theory. She is a fellow and associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. She has been involved with Reset DOC since 2012, particularly the Venice-Delhi Dialogues, as well as the Istanbul Seminars. In 2019-20 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge University. She is the author of the prize-winning book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Harvard, 2012), and the co-editor with Ramin Jahanbegloo of Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent (Oxford, 2018) as well as with Volker Kaul of Minorities and Populism: Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe (Springer, 2020). She is currently working on a book about the place of Sanskrit in the construction of modern Hindu nationalism, and her long-term project is an intellectual biography of B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), the author of India’s liberal Constitution of 1950. She lives in Delhi and Istanbul.