Current Visitors at POLIS
PAVATE FELLOW- Professor Jayashree Vivekanandan
Jayashree Vivekanandan is Assistant Professor at the Department ofInternational Relations, South Asian University, New Delhi, and is the D.C. Pavate Visiting Fellow at POLIS. Prior to joining SAU, she worked at The Energy and Resources Institute and was subsequently associated with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. Her research interests include the interface between history and international relations, Indian strategic thought and practice, memory politics, and transboundary resource governance in South Asia. She is the author of Interrogating International Relations: India's Strategic Practice and the Return of History, New Delhi and London: Routledge, 2011.
VISITING FELLOWS
DR CHARLES I-HSIN CHEN
Dr Charles I-hsin Chen is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at POLIS. He is also a research associate in the Centre of Taiwan Studies at SOAS, University of London. He received his BA in politics from National Taiwan University, MSc in development studies and PhD in economics from SOAS in 2014. His doctoral thesis identifies the driving forces behind the mass privatisation of Chinese state-owned enterprises from the late 1990s. Charles served as the spokesman of Taiwan's Presidential Office (2015-16), and the spokesman and director of international affairs in the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party (2014-15). His research interest covers a wide range of topics in China’s economic reform in the state sector, Taiwan’s party politics and election campaigns, cross-Strait political and economic relations, and the sovereignty disputes in the East and South China Seas. His current programme in the Centre for Rising Powers is to examine the legal and political impacts brought by the South China Sea arbitration on the formation of maritime governance in the South China Sea. He has over a hundred writings of editorials, columns, commentaries and letters published on Taiwan and international newspapers on various topics in recent years.
MR RASMUS CORLIN CHRISTENSEN
Rasmus Corlin Christensen is a Visiting Fellow at POLIS and a PhD Fellow at the Department of Business and Politics at Copenhagen Business School. He holds a Master’s degree in International Business and Politics from Copenhagen Business School. Prior to joining CBS, he worked for KPMG and the Ministry of Finance in Denmark. His doctoral research looks at processes of international tax governance, identifying key actors and main dynamics of change and stability. Specifically, his current work is investigating the role of professionals and experts in shaping the international tax regime, international tax practice and global wealth chains. Rasmus’ research is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 framework program, COFFERS, a collaboration of 10 universities and civil society organisations across Europe. His work has been recognized broadly; most recently, Rasmus was named to the 2017 Global Tax 50, the International Tax Review’s list of influential individuals and organisations in the tax world.
VISITING SCHOLARS
DR GENTIAN ELEZI
Gentian Elezi is a director at the research institute Agenda in Albania and a lecturer in European Politics. His previous experiences include serving as Vice Minister of European integration in the Albanian government and working as a consultant in EU affairs in the Balkan region. He holds a PhD in Politics and an MA in European Politics, both from the University of Sussex, UK. He obtained his BA in Political Science in the University of Milan, Italy. During his career he has directed and participated in several research projects.
Dr Elezi is a visiting scholar affiliated with the Department of Politics and International Relations, at the University of Cambridge. His research at POLIS focuses on the role of domestic politics of EU member states in the Enlargement policy
DR MARTIN JACQUES
Martin Jacques is the author of the global best-seller When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. It was first published in 2009 and has since been translated into fifteen languages and sold 350,000 copies. The book has been shortlisted for two major literary awards. A second edition of the book, greatly expanded and fully updated, was published in 2012. His TED talk on how to understand China has had over 2 million views. He is a Senior Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy, Washington DC.
He has previously been a Visiting Professor at Renmin University, the International Centre for Chinese Studies, Aichi University, Nagoya, and Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. He was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He was until recently a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at IDEAS, a centre for diplomacy and grand strategy, and a fellow at the Asia Research Centre, both at the London School of Economics. He was formerly the editor of the renowned London-based monthly Marxism Today until its closure in 1991 and was co-founder of the think-tank Demos. He has been a columnist for many newspapers, made many television programmes and is a former deputy editor of The Independent newspaper. He took his doctorate while at King’s College, Cambridge.
He has been invited to give lectures at many of the world’s top universities including Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, UCLA, USC, Cambridge, Oxford, Peking, Tsinghua, Renmin, NUS, Tokyo, University of Hong Kong, amongst many others. He has given talks to many corporate clients including Bank of America, BlackRock, Pictet, Shell, Allianz, BNP Paribas, Financial Times, British Telecom, BBC, HR50, Amerada Hess, Investec, DSM and Khazanah.
DR QIFU LIN
Qifu Lin, is a visiting scholar at POLIS from September 2017 to September 2018 which funded by the China Scholarship Council. His academic interests focus on western political thought from sixteen to late-nineteenth century, theories of political representation and the politics of the Chinese People’s Congress. He is a professor and chairman in the Department of Political Science, School of Public Administration at Jilin University. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics, obtained from Jilin University in China.
PROFESSOR LERNA YANIK
Lerna K. Yanık, is professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey. She received her B.A. from Boğaziçi University and her Ph.D. from Georgetown University and has worked at Bilkent University, in Ankara, Turkey before coming to Kadir Has University in 2011. Dr. Yanık is the first prize winner of the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award in 2006 and has spent a semester at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center as a visiting Fulbright scholar in 2009-2010.
She specializes in Turkish foreign policy, politics of space and place, critical geopolitics as well as culture and politics and has published her research in journals such as Die Welt des Islams, Asian Journal of Social Sciences, International Journal, Turkish Studies, Uluslararası İlişkiler (in Turkish), Political Geography, Geopolitics, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Human Rights Quarterly and Europe-Asia Studies. Dr. Yanık is currently on sabbatical leave from Kadir Has University and is a Derek Brewer Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College for the Michaelmas Term 2017 and is also affiliated with the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge until June 2018.
DR HANNA PFEIFER
Hanna Pfeifer is a visiting post-doctoral scholar at POLIS and a research associate at the Institute of International Politics at Helmut Schmidt University / the University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg where she also gained her PhD (2017). She studied at the University of Munich and Sciences Po (Institut d’Etudes Politiques) Paris and holds a Magister Artium (2012) in Politics, Philosophy and Mathematics.
Her main research interests are the transforming world order and the role of Arab states and non-state actors in challenging, reproducing and reinventing global order. Her PhD research dealt with Islamist discursive constructions of world order and how they relate to Western, liberal concepts. At POLIS, she will work on recent military interventions in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly focusing on the aspect of democratic-autocratic cooperation. Hanna’s research is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
MR KONSTANTINOS BIZAS
Konstantinos Bizas is a Ph.D. candidate in political thought and conceptual history at the Dept. of Social Sciences and Philosophy of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, as well as the holder of a MA in Political Thought from the University of Exeter, UK, a MA in Political Science & Sociology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and a BA in Political Science from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
He has been working for a few years on a doctoral dissertation that examines the methodological aspects of the prestigious work of the late Cambridge classics in the history of political thought and the history of ideas (John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and John Dunn), whereas his broader academic and research interests fall into the domains of political thought and conceptual history, canonized political philosophy, methodological and knowledge-theory perspectives in the human sciences, as well as the study of Greek politics and Greek cultural and intellectual history.
His visit to the POLIS Department of Cambridge in springtime 2018 aims to provide substantial advances to his doctoral project in the form of specified interviews and first-hand affiliation with the academic environment and the protagonists of what has been conventionally labelled as the ‘Cambridge School’ approach in the history of political thought.