Past Community Members

Past Visiting Scholars

Adam Shinar

Adam Shinar is an associate Professor at the Harry Radzyner Law School at Reichman University. He was a Visiting Scholar at the CCDS in September 2024. During his stay, he presented two of his works-in-progress: “Boycotting German and Germany: Artistic Censorship and the Creation of Israel, 1948-1967” and “Constitutional Overhaul, the War in Gaza, and the Puzzle of Civic Mobilization in Israel”.

Prof. Adam Shinar holds an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he also served as the Clark Byse Fellow. He also holds an LL.B. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. He clerked for the President of the Israeli Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, and worked as an attorney for several human rights NGOs in Israel and India.He specializes in constitutional law and theory and comparative constitutional law. His academic interests include labor law, administrative law, legal theory, sociology of law, and political philosophy. He has written on diverse topics, such as obedience to law by public officials, judicial review, constitutional interpretation, public sector reforms, constitutional rights in the Occupied Territories, and freedom of speech. More recently, he is working on the history of censorship of films and plays in Israel.

Prof. Shinar’s publications appeared in leading journals such as The American Journal of Comparative Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Global Constitutionalism, Constitutional Commentary, the Theory and Practice of Legislation, and the Connecticut Law Review, among others. His research was presented in leading universities such as Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and the European University Institute, in addition to being cited by the Israeli SupremeCourt.Prof. Shinar was awarded the 2013 Israeli Association of Public Law Gorni Prize for Young Researchers. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and an academic advisory board member of the Israel Supreme Court Project at Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University. He also served as a visiting professor at Católica University Law School in Lisbon.

Noam Maggor

Noam Maggor is Senior Lecturer in American History at the Queen Mary University of London. He was a Visiting Scholar at the CCDS in 2023-2024, working on his new project, tentatively entitled “The United States as a Developing Nation”, which interrogates the integration of vast territories of what became the American West into the economic orbit of the United States. With renewed attention to the core concerns of political economy, it aims to position the Western U.S. comparatively alongside other global peripheries – in Russia, Egypt, India, and Latin America – that were aggressively pulled in this period into the world economy.

Noam Maggor is a historian of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the emergence of industrial capitalism. His book Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age, is a finance-driven and urban-centered account of the transformation of American capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century. It explores how the United States shifted from its former position in the world economy as an exporter of agricultural commodities – cotton, above all – to an industrial nation and imperial power on the world stage. In particular, the book analyzes the creation of an interconnected national market, which has long been viewed as immutable and technologically-driven, as a contentious and highly malleable political project. It more generally examines economic change as politically constituted and deeply ideological, transcending conceptual divides between economics, politics, culture, and society.

Noam’s broad interests include the history of capitalism, history of globalization, history of the state, business history, urban history, history of the United States, and the history of the American west.

Sofia Valeonti

Sofia Valeonti is Assistant Professor at the AUP Department of Economics and Management. She was a Faculty Fellow at the CCDS in 2022-2023 when she organized seminars on the history of economic thought, co-organized a conference on the “The American Developmental State: The Origins of American Capitalism in Comparative Perspective”, and took part in a reading group on the history of neoliberalism.

Professor Valeonti holds a PhD in Economics from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and has been a post-doc research fellow at Duke University. She is a historian of economics, especially interested in the history of monetary ideas and policies of 19th century US. Her research focuses on the interplay between economic theory, policy, and visions of economic development in the context of the monetary policy debates of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period (1865-1879). She is currently focusing her research to shed light on the role of monetary policies and ideas in the building of American capitalism, with particular emphasis on the way monetary policies affected the economic policies related to the status of the newly emancipated slaves.

Research Areas

Monetary and banking economics
History of monetary theories and ideas
International money and finance
U.S. 19th century political economy

Interview with Sofia Valeonti

Scott Stephenson

Scott Stephenson is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne. He was a Visiting Scholar at the CCDS in April-May 2023 as part of his sabbatical for the purpose of conducting research on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for constitutional democracy.

After receiving his BA and LLB(Hons) with the University Medal in Law from the Australian National University, Dr. Scott Stephenson worked at the High Court of Australia for two years, first as the Court’s Legal Research Officer and subsequently as Associate to Justice Virginia Bell AC. He then obtained his LLM and JSD from Yale University. He has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, University of Copenhagen, King’s College London and University of Oxford. He is the Treasurer and a Council Member of the Australian Association of Constitutional Law.

His research focuses on topics of Australian and comparative constitutional law and theory, including federalism, models of rights protection, the separation of powers, and the use of comparative materials. His book on the bills of rights in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, From Dialogue to Disagreement in Comparative Rights Constitutionalism, was awarded the Holt Prize in 2015. He has published in a number of leading Australian, Irish, UK, US and international journals, including the American Journal of Comparative Law, Dublin University Law Journal, Federal Law Review, International Journal of Constitutional Law, Melbourne University Law Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and Sydney Law Review.

Michael Sonenscher

Michael Sonenscher is Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and was for many years its Director of Studies in History. He was a Visiting Scholar at the CCDS in March 2023. During his stay, he gave two lectures, on his 2020 book, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Division of Labour, The Politics of the Imagination and the Concept of Federal Government (Brill), and on his 2022 book Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton University Press).

Professor Sonenscher has published widely on French and European history and the history of political thought. Among his earlier works are also Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (1989), Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (2007) and Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (2008).

Carlo Burelli

Carlo Burelli is Assistant Professor at the University of Eastern Piedmont. He was a Visiting Scholar at the CCDS in 2021-2022, teaching “Ethical Inquiry: Problems and Paradigms”. Carlo's research is focused on traditional political realism, which has seen increased focus recently as a criticism of liberal theory, bridging classical philosophies of Machiavelli and Hobbes to contemporary issues. He brought a contemporary realist justification of democracy to the CCDS, one based on Machiavellian republicanism. In the Ethical Inquiry course, he explored normative ethics, whether the skepticism of ethics is warranted and how to answer skeptical challenges. His research is broadly interested in clarifying what can and should hold together today’s large and conflictual societies. This vast question led him to cross various debates: utopian and realist political theory, theories of justice and theories of legitimacy, solidarity and equality in contemporary political societies. He published two monographs in Italian, and several articles in leading international journals (such as European Journal of Political Theory, Journal of Common Market Studies, and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice).

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Past Community Members

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