Affiliated Faculty

Max Abrahms

Max Abrahms is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy. He is an expert on international security, U.S. foreign policy and the study of terrorism. His classes include Terrorism and Counterterrorism (POLS 3423). Prof. Abrahms has been a visiting fellow at Bar Ilan University, Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the American Jewish Committee. He is the author of Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History and numerous articles. At Northeastern, Abrahms is the faculty advisor for the student group Huskies for Israel, and is a board member at Hillel.

m.abrahms@northeastern.edu, https://rulesforrebels.info/

Libby Adler

Libby Adler has a joint appointment as Professor of Law and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern Law School and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.  She has taught courses on constitutional law, sexuality, gender, and the law, family law, and administrative law, and has written about sexuality, gender, family, and constitutional issues, as well as contemporary legal issues arising out of Nazism. She is the author of Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform.

l.adler@northeastern.edu

Natalie Bormann

Teaching Professor Natalie Bormann’s work centers on the interplay of trauma, memory, and ethics in international relations, which she mostly explores in the context of the Holocaust, and genocide studies more broadly. She is especially interested in posing pedagogical questions regarding the teaching and learning about genocide. Her courses include the Holocaust and Comparative Genocide (HIST/JWSS 2282) and Genocide in a Comparative Perspective (POLS 7366).
Professor Bormann’s most recent book The Ethics of Teaching at Sites of Trauma and Violence – Student Encounters with the Holocaust chronicles her time with students of her Holocaust and Genocide Studies Dialogue of Civilizations program that she leads each summer, comprising the courses History and the Politics of the Holocaust: Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (POLS 4937) and Memory, Trauma and the Holocaust (POLS 4938).

n.bormann@northeastern.edu

Phil Brown

Phil Brown is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences, and Director of the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute. His work relates to the intersection of environmental health science and social science.
Professor Brown is an expert on the Jewish experience in the Catskills. He is the author of Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area, and the editor of In the Catskills: A Century Of The Jewish Experience In “The Mountains,” and Summer Haven: The Catskills, the Holocaust, and the Literary Imagination (with Holly Levitsky). Professor Brown is founder and president of the Catskills Institute, a research organization possessing the world’s largest archive of material on the Jewish experience in the Catskills, much of it available digitally through a project of the Northeastern Library’s Digital Scholarship Group, https://catskillsinstitute.northeastern.edu/.

p.brown@northeastern.edu

Elizabeth Bucar

Professor of Philosophy and Religion Liz Bucar is a religious ethicist who studies sexuality, gender, and moral transformation within the Abrahamic (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) traditions and communities. She is author of three books, including the award-winning Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress. She has been on the forefront of creating bridges and partnerships between scholars of religion and journalists, winning an inaugural Luce/ACLS grant in Religion, Journalism, and International Affairs for the project Reporting Religion and a Henry Luce Grant in Theology for the project Sacred Writes. Professor Bucar’s courses include Sex in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (PHIL/WMNS 1271).

e.bucar@northeastern.edu, https://bucar.hcommons.org/

Jonathan Kaufman

Jonathan Kaufman joined Northeastern University in 2015 as Professor and Director in the School of Journalism. Prior to joining Northeastern, he held senior positions at Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, editor, and author of three books focusing on the Jewish experience in modern times: Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe and the newly published The Last Kings of Shanghai.

j.kaufman@northeastern.edu, http://www.jonathankaufman.org/

William Miles

William Miles is Professor of Political Science and is the author of Zion in the Desert: American Jews in Israel’s Reform Kibbutzim, Jews of Nigeria: An Afro-Judaic Odyssey, and Afro-Jewish Encounters: From Timbuktu to the Indian Ocean and Beyond, and co-editor of In the Shadow of Moses: New Jewish Movements in Africa and the Diaspora. Currently he is working on Another Israel, a linguistic memoir based on his extended sojourn in a Druze village in the Upper Galilee. Professor Miles has also published on the Jewish experience in the French Antilles, French language use among Jews and Arabs, local voting patterns in the Israeli Arab sector, the electoral strength of religious parties, and how Israeli geography classes teach about the nation’s boundaries. Prof. Miles convened the first-ever international symposium on Third World Views of the Holocaust and is currently the lead collaborator on an American Academy of Jewish Research cross-institutional grant on the topic Jews in Muslim and Shared Diasporas. Most recently, he has received a Global Scholar Award from the Fulbright program to conduct research on brain drain reversal policies as they concern Jewish emigrés from Israel, India and Morocco. His courses include Religion and Politics (POLS 2370).

b.miles@northeastern.edu