Visiting Faculty
Jasmina Besirevic-Regan
Lecturer (Fall 2008)
Jasmina Besirevic-Regan graduated from Augsburg College summa cum laude, a small liberal arts college in Minneapolis, MN, earning the Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology. In 2004, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale having also earned the Master’s degree here. Her dissertation on ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka focuses on the emergence of a Bosnian Muslim refugee community. Her teaching and research interests include genocide and ethnic conflict, identity and nationalism. Her current work focuses on the Bosnian Muslim identity and disintegration of former Yugoslavia. She has presented papers on the sociology of genocide at a number of professional meetings and has been invited to speak at international conferences both at Yale and abroad. She is currently teaching an undergraduate seminar Genocide and Ethnic Conflict in the Departments of Sociology, International Studies and Ethnicity, Race and Migration.
Juho Härkönen
Lecturer (Spring 2009)
Juho Härkönen is Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course at Yale University. He is broadly interested in the link between families and socio-economic inequalities. In his doctoral dissertation (European University Institute, defended in November 2007), he analyzed the simultaneous joblessness of both partners of a couple (dual joblessness) in thirteen European countries. He has also worked on divorce risk factors from a cross-national and cross-cohort perspective. At CIQLE, his research includes examination of sibling resemblance and differences in socioeconomic attainment, and analysis of the effects of prenatal and infant health on educational attainment and mobility. CIQLE Bio Page.
Marwan Khawaja
Visiting Professor
Marwan Khawaja is Professor and Director, Center for Research on Population and Health at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and was on the Faculty of Syracuse University and Birzeit University. He is a member of the Specialist Panel on Social Science Research for Reproductive Health at WHO, Geneva, and founding member of the Middle East Health Policy Forum. His current research interests revolve around conflict and public health, forced migration/refugees, social welfare and social determinants of health in the Middle East. He has published extensively on these topics, and his work appeared in Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Population Studies, Population, Social Science Research, Social Science and Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, International Migration, and Economic Development and Cultural Change among others. He is currently co-editing a book on Health and Society in the Arab World for Cambridge University Press.
Matthew McKeever
Visiting Associate Professor (Spring 2009)
Matthew McKeever’s work focuses primarily on issues of social and economic inequality. He studies these issues in international comparative perspective, with a primary focus on the countries of southern Africa and eastern Europe. He has also studied economic inequality in the U.S., including the economic consequences of divorce. His research has appeared in Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Demography, Social Science Quarterly, and other journals. He is also a contributor to Governing American Cities: Inter-Ethnic Coalitions, Competition, and Conflict (Russell Sage Press, 2001) and Fragile Families and the Marriage Agenda (Kluwer, 2005). Mount Holyoke Bio Page.
Abebe Zegeye
Visiting Professor
Professor Abebe Zegeye, Primedia Chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Graduate School, University of South Africa, is heavily involved in a number of international, continental and local projects in addition to his research and his masters and doctoral post-graduate teaching duties. For the academic year 2008-09 he will be the Rice Family Foundation Visiting Professor at Yale University in the United States.
As Chair of Genocide and Holocaust studies he has initiated a number of ground-breaking new projects: 1) He has launched a project to begin soliciting entries on a world-wide basis for a comprehensive encyclopaedia of genocide and violence in Africa. 2) He has been involved in discussion for the restoration of the old Synagogue in the city centre of Pretoria. It is envisaged that this historic, century-old building (closely linked with a history of the liberation struggle as the venue for the Treason Trial) will be used as an interactive centre of coexistence. The plan is to actively encourage research into and understanding of continent-wide African liberation struggles and genocide and war.
Prof Zegeye is widely published, being author, co-author and/or editor of many publications including a book series. He has also written extensively in accredited international academic journals on African identity formation, nationalist struggles, ethnicity, African genocide and Ethiopian socio-political trends in the Horn of Africa.
He is co-editor of 2 international, accredited journals, namely African Identities; and African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Taylor & Francis, Routledge publications. He also serves in numerous academic journal editorial boards.
He has recently launched a new project to give wider exposure and recognition to the work of African cultural artists. With the celebration of the Ethiopian millennium he has produced publications on and brokered cultural links with jazz musician Mulatu Astatke and artist Zerihun Yetmgeta.