Naomi Levy
Position: Assistant Professor Naomi Levy is the newest member of the department. She teaches Applied Quantitative Methods and courses in Comparative Politics. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. Her main fields are Methodology and Comparative Politics, with a focus on South-Eastern Europe. Her research focuses on the role of schools in constructing identities in divided societies. Specifically, her dissertation, Learning National Identity: Schooling Effects in Post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, combines qualitative and quantitative methods to examine identity politics in the schools of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. She argues that the greatest peace-building challenge faced by both of these Yugoslav successor states is to navigate the tension between the need for social cohesion at the level of the state and the desire to preserve the cultural integrity of the various groups that make up the state's population, and that resolving the conflicts over education is a vital piece of this puzzle. She spent two years working as a research assistant on UC Berkeley Human Rights Center's Communities in Crisis project, in which she oversaw the collection of interview and focus group qualitative data in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, analyzed the data, and collaborated on a chapter in Eric Stover and Harvey Weinsetin, (eds.), My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community after Mass Atrocity (2004). In addition to receiving numerous Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships and departmental support, Naomi was awarded the American Council of Learned Societies' Disseration Fellowship in East European Studies. |
