I am a faculty member (assistant professor) in the Department of International Relations and the Program in International Development Studies (Glocal) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the head of Glocal's Migration & Development Track.

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With academic grounding in both sociology and international relations, my work focuses on security and emotions, global migration and refugees, space and borders. I am particularly interested in what occurs in the margins of societies, in the spatial margins of modern polities, and in the outermost margins of the international sphere.

Another interrelated line of my research addresses social phenomena from an international political sociology (IPS) perspective. My research was published in journals such as International Theory, Security Dialogue, International Studies Review and Political Psychology.

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Prior to joining the faculty of the Hebrew University in 2019, I completed my Ph.D. in both the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University, as well as an LL.B in the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law. I continued to UCLA as a Rothschild (Yad Hanadiv) post-doctoral fellow in UCLA’s International Institute and Department of Sociology, and then joined the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MBSF) at the Hebrew University.

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I use both classical and contemporary social theory in my works. My research applies classical sociological and anthropological approaches (Simmel, van Gennep) to understand current global phenomena (published in venues such as International Studies Review, Journal of Classical Sociology and International Theory); explores the legacies of prominent sociologists like SN Eisenstadt and the relevance/limits of their approaches in analyzing globalization, sovereignty and collective identities (in an edited book with Gad Yair); and utilizes contemporary approaches in sociology and IR to study borders, security, emotions and mobility (published in such venues as Security Dialogue and Political Psychology).

My recent works are situated within ontological security studies (OSS), everyday geopolitics, a climate mobilities perspective, and visual IR. My most recent research projects focus on imaginaries of home and ontological insecurity in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023 (ISF 1148/24), and on toponyms, urban streetscapes and the formal and informal attempts to 'normalize' Gaza Street in Jerusalem (with Oren Barak).

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My work is also grounded in extensive empirical and ethnographic research, studying an array of migrant groups and host societies in various political and international contexts. I focus particularly on actors who suffer multiple marginalities and flee states that turn against their own citizens, such as Eritrean asylum-seeking women in Southern Tel-Aviv (with Skyler Inman, Brandeis University) and Darfurian asylum-seekers in Israel. I have also studied the changing reactions of host societies to massive migration inflows, focusing on the German societal response to the 2015 'refugee crisis'; analyzed the branching-out of citizenship tests for immigrants in Western countries (with Oded Lowenheim); and conducted in-depth extensive studies of various immigrant communities, including Latin American political exiles who fled to Israel following their political persecution in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil in the 1970s, Ethiopian immigrants in Israel (with Gad Yair), and the Lebanese forced migrants who collaborated with Israel and then fled from Southern Lebanon to Israel in 2000.

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You are welcome to read more about my ongoing research on my research page.