Professor Hagar Kotef

Hagar Kotef is a Professor of Political Theory in the department of Politics and International Studies. Her recent book, The Colonizing Self (Or: Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine), examines the construction of political belonging and territorial attachments in settler colonies. It investigates how people develop attachment to space not despite violence, or by denying it, but rather through violence. The book was published in 2020 by Duke University Press, and won several awards, including the C.B Macpherson book award and the Yale Ferguson Award. It further received Honorable Mentions of the MESA Fatema Mernissi Book Award, the Sussex International Theory Prize, and the IPS-ISA book award. Her previous book, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (Duke UP, 2015) charts the conceptual history of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces: from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank. 

Before joining SOAS she held positions and fellowships at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University, the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University, Columbia University's Society of Fellows, and the University of CA, Berkeley.