Member Bios: Researchers on the UoE and the Question of Palestine

Researchers on the UoE and the Question of Palestine

Dr Shaira Vadasaria

Shaira Vadasaria in a lecturer in sociology of race and decolonial studies in the School of Social and Political Science. Prior to joining UoE, she held an Assistant Professorship appointment at Al-Quds University, Bard College, Palestine (2016-2019) and a Visiting Professorship in the Global and International Studies program at Carleton University, Canada (2020). Upon joining UoE in 2020, she co-founded RACE.ED, a university-wide multidisciplinary teaching and research repository on the study of race and decolonial studies at the University of Edinburgh and established a university-wide curricula on the subject. Her research advances interdisciplinary social inquiry on genealogies of race, racial violence, humanitarianism and the politics of repair under conditions of settler colonialism and imperialism. Her working monograph, Return: Race, Redress and Refusal in Palestine reads land-based and sensory claims to return against the limit points of liberal recognition in a post-Oslo reconciliatory landscape and against the long durée of failed legal redress to the question of Palestine. Some of her publications include, “Sensory Politics of Return: Hearing Gaza under Siege,” in Gaza on Screen, Duke University Press 2023; “1948-1951: the racial politics of humanitarianism and return in Palestine,” Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 2020; “Race and Colonialism in Socio-Legal Studies in Canada (co-authored with Carmela Murdocca and Tim Bryan),” in Violence, Imagination, and Resistance: Socio-legal Interrogations of Power, Athabasca University Press, 2023; “Uninhibited Violence: Race and the Securitization of Immigration” (co-authored with David Moffette), Critical Studies on Security 2016; “Necronationalism: managing race, death and the nation’s skeletons,” Social Identities 2015 & “Anti-Colonial Poetics: A Methodology from and for Palestine” Imaginative Inquiry: Innovative Approaches to Interdisciplinary Research, 2014. She has done interviews with Al Jazeera (Arabic channel) and published in Mondoweiss.

Dr Nicola Perugini

Nicola Perugini teaches international politics. His research focuses mainly on the politics of international law, human rights, and violence. He is the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press 2015), Morbid Symptoms (Sharjah Biennial 13, 2017), and Human Shields. A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press 2020). Nicola has published articles on war and the ethics of violence; the politics of human rights, humanitarianism, and international law; humanitarianism’s visual cultures; war and embedded anthropology; refugees and asylum seekers; law, space and colonialism; settler-colonialism. Nicola is currently working on three research projects. The first, “Decolonising the Civilian,” examines decolonisation and national liberation wars, international law, and the status of civilians in armed conflicts. The second is an exploration of the global history of the University of Edinburgh during the mandate of one of his imperial chancellors, Arthur James Balfour. The third is focused on the fascist institution of youth summer colonies and their relationship with the history of race and Italian colonialism. Nicola has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2012/2013), a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University (2014-2016), and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (2017-2019), and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow (2022/2023). He has taught at the American University of Rome, the Al Quds Bard College in Jerusalem where he also directed the Human Rights Program, Brown University, and the University of Bologna. He has been a member of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Council (2019-2022). He has served as consultant for UNESCO and UN Women. His opinion pieces have appeared in Al Jazeera English, London Review of Books, Jewish Currents, Al-Akhbar, Al-Ayyam, TRT, Newsweek, Internazionale, The Nation, the Huffington Post, The Conversation, Just Security, Open Democracy, Counterpunch, The Herald, The National, Jadaliyya, +972 Magazine, e-flux.

Research Assistants:

Hajar Ibrahim is a Law and International Relations graduate from the University of Edinburgh. Hajar was one of the key figures of the community mobilisation for divestment at UoE, building the encampment with students and the wider coalition. In 2024, Hajar was nominated and shortlisted by the Edinburgh University Student Association for ‘Outstanding Leadership’. Hajar’s research interests are in contemporary Arab thought, post-colonial and settler colonial studies.

Henry Dee is a postdoctoral research fellow in history at the University of Glasgow. While completing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh between 2015 and 2020, he was coordinator of the UncoverED project, looking into the history of students from across the British empire in Edinburgh and the university’s broader entanglement in empire.

Tom Cunningham is an honorary fellow in history at the University of Edinburgh. While completing a PhD and teaching at Edinburgh, he was coordinator of the UncoverED project, looking into the history of students from across the British empire in Edinburgh and the university’s broader entanglement in empire.