Pavlina Tcherneva
Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Ph.D., is a Professor of Economics at Bard College and a Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, NY. She specializes in labor markets, unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory and public policy.
EDI Staff
EDI Affiliated Faculty
Nurgul Ukueva
Jimena Hurtado
Jimena Hurtado is Professor at the Department of Economics, Universidad de los Andes, working on the history of economic thought in the 18th century, the philosophy of economics, and political and moral philosophy. Products from this research, on the thought of Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, and Alexis de Tocqueville, have been published in several scholarly outlets, and inform teaching focused in the history of economic thought for undergraduate students, civic education and general education courses with a strong component of political and moral philosophy. Jimena has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Paris X and is co-editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, a publication of the History of Economics Society.
Meem Arafat Manab
Meem Arafat Manab is a full-time lecturer at the School of Data and Sciences of BRAC University, Bangladesh. With a a background in computer science and prior experience in qualitative research and mathematics education, Meem has taught mathematics and CS courses at the university since late 2020. They strongly believe in the political nature of academia, and their interests lie in the increasing overlapping area between computer science, social sciences, and humanities.
A fellow of the Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences Pedagogy (CLASP) at Bard College, New York, they have also worked as a translator and consultant for development organizations. Among their research interests are ethics and philosophy of artificial intelligence, computational social sciences, econometrics, machine translation, and the incorporation of technology in education.
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.
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.
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.
EDI Student Fellows
Emi Cooper
Emi Cooper is a sophomore Economics Major at Bard, pursuing the Open Society University Network (OSUN) Academic Certificate in Public Policy and Economic Analysis. Growing up in Brooklyn, NY, Emi lived in close proximity to food and housing insecurity. This inspired her to become a social justice activist in high school, advocating for racial and economic justice with various organizations including Justice League NYC, Teens Take Charge, and the YA-YA Network. During her gap year, Emi volunteered as a primary school teacher at a rural primary school on the Coast of Kenya. Since then, Emi has been independently fundraising to support the village, where poverty rates are high and employment opportunities are next to none. Emi is passionate about creating change to the economies of developing countries through reform of global financial institutions. As a Black person and the daughter of a formerly incarcerated man, Emi is also interested in studying the prison industrial complex, the atrocities of mass incarceration, and the labor situation for formerly incarcerated individuals. Emi leads the Bard ReEntry Collaborative, which she created in response to a resource need for juveniles, as they do not have access to the Bard Prison Initiative and Bard Baccalaureate programs. Emi is also an OSUN Global Fellow, serving as a leader of civic engagement on Bard campus and within the international network.
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.