CAF Members
Somdeep Sen
I am Associate Professor of International Development Studies at Roskilde University in Denmark. I am the author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial (Cornell University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Globalizing Collateral Language: From 9/11 to Endless War (University of Georgia Press, 2021). My research focuses on Palestine/Israel, Settler Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Race and Racism in International Relations, Liberation Movements and Spatial Politics. My interest in the BRISMES Committee on Academic Freedom is rooted in my experiences as a student and now a scholar of the Middle East in general and Palestine/Israel in particular.
Having started my undergraduate education at a small liberal arts university in upstate New York in 2003 – i.e., at the height of the America’s “War on Terror” and the year of the US invasion of Iraq – I witnessed very closely the various manners of (self-)censorship of critical pedagogies, curricular approaches and scholarship that can happen in times of perceived national crisis and jingoism. Equally, as a critical scholar of the politics of Palestine/Israel, I have faced targeted efforts aimed at undermining my scholarship and hampering my professional reputation. I therefore recognize the critical importance of the work of the BRISMES Committee on Academic Freedom in terms of monitoring and defending academic freedom in the study, teaching and research of Middle East Studies.
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