Hagar Kotef, Ph.D.,
Tel Aviv University, School of Philosophy
 

Hagar Kotef received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 2009. Her dissertation, titled Tracing the Political Body, analyzes the politicization of the body in First Wave liberal feminism. Returning to the point when the abstract woman – the female incarnation of the liberal subject – was formed, it shows that many of the campaigns of 19th century liberal feminism were part of an attempt to figure new forms of embodiment and new relations between (women’s) bodies and politics. In a way, the abstract woman was the product of the failure of these attempts.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Hagar will work on a new project concerning embodiment as a political technology. Focusing on the regime of movement employed by Israel in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, it seeks to examine a new mode of subject-formation operating outside of normalizing regimes and subtending what we may call the paradigm of security.

She will teach “Gender and Violence” in the fall semester, and Contemporary Civilization in the Spring.

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