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EDI welcomes our inaugural OSUN partner institution affiliated faculty. EDI is leading a series of collaborative workshops with OSUN faculty to develop a series of Network Collaborative Courses, research activities with OSUN affiliated faculty, and the development of a Certificate in Public Policy.
Jeannette Alden Estruth is Assistant Professor of American History at Bard College, and a Faculty Associate at the Harvard Law School Berkman- Klein Center for Internet and Society. She is currently working on her book manuscript, The New Utopia: A Political History of the Silicon Valley, which explores the history of social movements, the technology industry, and economic culture in the United States. Estruth received her doctorate in History, with honors, from New York University in 2018. In 2019, her book project was a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Huntington Library, the University of Virginia Miller Center, and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. She has contributed articles to the Washington Post, Public Seminar, Spotlight, Nichons-Nous Dans L’Internet, Business Insider, and Enterprise and Society, among others. Prior to her doctoral work, Estruth worked in editorial for Harvard University Press and the Radical History Review.
Jimena Hurtado is Full Professor at the Department of Economics, Universidad de los Andes, working on the history of economic thought in the XVIIIth 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 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 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 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 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.
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 welcomes our inaugural EDI Student Fellows. We offer both paid and unpaid opportunities for OSUN students.
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.
Billie is a rising junior at Bard College majoring in economics and is pursuing the Levy Institute’s 3+2 accelerated M.S. program in economic theory and policy. Her focus is international finance and heterodox approaches to creating equitable public programs. She works as an economics tutor at Bard and serves as co-chair of the student-led think tank Project for Policy Innovation. In her spare time, you can find her raising ducks and geese in the mountains of Vermont.
Ashley is a member of the Bard College Class of 2022. She studies Environmental and Urban Studies with a focus area of Economics, Policy, and Global Development. Her Senior Project critically examines the persistence of inequality in Johannesburg, South Africa during the post-Apartheid era as a product of neoliberal restructuring and globalization. Ashley is particularly interested in how imaginative economic policies may be leveraged as a pathway to social change and more equitable and inclusive futures. Ashley was named Bard College’s Richard D. and Nancy M. Griffiths Scholar in 2019, and the Milners “Canadian” Scholar in 2020. In 2022, Ashley was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for her project “Community Science as Community Agency.” Through the Watson Fellowship, she will spend a year abroad in South Africa, Brazil, Australia and Ireland engaging with participatory science projects.
Zainab Adib is a senior student at American University of Central Asia majoring in Economics. Before entering AUCA, she studied Public Policy and Administration at Kabul University for one year which shaped her views on connecting public policy and economics. Zainab completed an Erasmus exchange semester at Bard College Berlin in Spring 2022. At the same time, she works with Afghan refugees in Berlin. She discovered many challenges that refugees encounter on a daily basis while volunteering for and working with refugees, which connects to her own experience of living as a refugee in Quetta City of Pakistan. She is preparing an undergraduate thesis about public policies for refugee integration into the economy.
Eli is a Cambodian-American, rising-junior at Bard College majoring in economics and intends to enroll in the M.S. program in economic theory and policy at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He looks to study heterodox economics and use his knowledge and research to promote full-employment and functional finance. Additionally, Eli was named Bard College’s latest Amicus Foundation Scholar, an endowed scholarship awarded annually to a qualified and deserving student in the field of economics.
Fiona Miller is a rising-junior and Political Studies major at Bard College, focusing on American Politics and Political Theory. She has lived in Chicago for her entire life, and attributes her interest in solving political, economic, and social issues to her lived experience of growing up in the city. Fiona has served as a staging location director and campaign intern for Representative Antonio Delgado’s re-election campaign, helping to ensure his victory in a very close race. She has made the honor list every semester at Bard, and intends to attend law school after graduation.
Tomas is a rising senior at Bard College majoring in Sociology, with specific focuses in environmental studies, law, and public policy. His academic and activist work has centered around identifying leverage points and innovative policy reforms through which the invaluable power of the federal government can better address the intertwined crisis of climate change, economic inequality, and environmental injustice. He believes that direct public employment in the environmental realm, combined with explicitly anti-racist environmental regulatory reform, will play a key role. Tomas's forthcoming Senior Project (May 2022) will take the form of a sociological analysis of environmental justice jurisprudence in New York and the U.S. more broadly.
Prior to Bard, Tomas graduated from The Putney School in 2017, also attending Ipswich High School and École alsacienne in Paris. He has been involved in local environmental civics in the Hudson Valley and in his hometown of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and helped develop a human ecology program at the Centre for Imagination at the Woodstock School in Mussoorie, India in 2018. Tomas is also a musician, horticulturist, and mountaineer.