People

Pavlina Tcherneva

Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Ph.D., is President of the Levy Economics Institute, Professor of Economics at Bard College, and Director of OSUN’s Economic Democracy Initiative, NY.  She is a macroeconomist specializing in monetary economics, labor markets, and public policy.

Albena Azmanova

Albena Azmanova, Ph.D., is a Professor of Political and Social Science at the University of Kent, Honorary Fellow at the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick, and Affiliate Member of the Bauman Institute, University of Leeds.

Scott Fullwiler

Scott Fullwiler, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at University of Missouri - Kansas City and Director of the UMKC Ph.D. program in Economics, as well as Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.

Asel Kyrgyzbaeva

Asel Kyrgyzbaeva is an assistant professor in the Economics Department of the American University of Central Asia. She holds a master’s degree in Economics from Indiana University, studied at Academy of Management of Kyrgyz Republic and graduated with honors from International University of Kyrgyzstan, B.A. in Economics. Currently she is working on her PhD on regional economic cooperation for the Kyrgyz Republic.

Asel has served as AUCA Registrar for four years (2011 - 2015) and has been an active member of AUCA community being a member of Academic Senate and numerous academic policy committees. From March 2018 till March 2021 she served as a member of the Board of Directors of Bakai Bank. Since April 2021 she is a member of the Board of Directors of Commercial bank Kyrgyzstan. 
 

Nurgul Ukueva

Sameh Hallaq

Sameh Hallaq is an assistant professor in the economics program at Al-Quds Bard College, Al-Quds University. He serves as an assistant vice president of finance and administration. Dr. Hallaq is a Research Associate at Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, New York (USA). He has obtained his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, in 2019. His research focuses on the effect of conflict on human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes.

Sobhi Samour

Sobhi Samour is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Al-Quds University, Bard College for Arts and Sciences in Jerusalem (AQB). He chairs the Economics and Finance Program, as well as the newly launched Social Thought, Economy, and Policy Program. Sobhi has a Ph.D. in economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). In 2017, he was the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow and postdoctoral research scholar at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University, where he worked on a comparative political economy of indigenous labor under settler colonialism. His main teaching and research interests include comparative economic development, political economy, economic history and the Palestinian economy.  He has published on Palestinian trade policy reform, Palestinian labor in Israel and the Palestinian Authority’s neoliberal economic policy reforms. He has also worked as a consultant and researcher for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the United Nations Development Program in Timor-Leste, and the Palestinian Economic Policy Research Institute.

Gale Raj-Reichert

Gale Raj-Reichert is Professor of Politics at Bard College Berlin. She holds a PhD in development studies from the University of Manchester Global Development Institute (2012) and teaches in the Politics concentration at Bard College Berlin. Her research is on labor governance in global production networks with a focus on the global electronics industry and outsourced manufacturing in the Asia Pacific region. Her research aims to understand how networked relationships and power asymmetries across different actors, such as governments, firms, and civil society organizations, shape and influence processes and outcomes for workers in outsourced factories of globalized industries.

Kai-Jonas Koddenbrock

Kai Koddenbrock is Professor of Political Economy at Bard College Berlin. He is working on economic sovereignty and self-determination in the Global South and particularly on the role of the international monetary system and global and domestic financial markets in helping and constraining this quest. Located at the intersections of international relations and international political economy, he also works on geopolitics and geoeconomics and the new scramble for rare earths. 

He co-founded, with Ndongo Sylla and Maha ben Gadha, the African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty conferences, which have been held in Tunis and Dakar in 2019 and 2022. He leads the Politics of Money Network with Benjamin Braun, funded by the German Research Council, and heads a research group at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth.

Emi Cooper

Emi Cooper finished her last year of an undergraduate degree in economics at Bard College in 2024, and is starting her first year of the Master of Science in Economic Theory and Policy at the Levy Economics Institute. Emi’s research interests are in the labor market and public policy, with a focus on the communities impacted by incarceration. She intends to write her master’s thesis about the criminalization of poverty, and propose a policy solution to this issue through publicly guaranteed employment. As a Black person and the daughter of a formerly incarcerated man, Emi is passionate about studying the prison industrial complex, the atrocities of mass incarceration and systemic racism, and the labor situation for formerly incarcerated individuals.

Shane Wray

Shane is a sophomore at Bard College majoring in economics and pursuing the Levy Institute’s 3+2 accelerated M.S. program with an interest in monetary economics.