A Conversation with Dr. Yael Berda | 05/01/2025

Daphna Fineberg ‘26, Anika Mukker '26, Hrishik Roy ‘27, and Naomi Franzblau ‘28 sit down for a conversation with Dr. Yael Berda.  

Dr. Yael Berda is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University and Academy Scholar for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. Previously, Berda was the Gerard Weinstock Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International & Regional Studies, WCFIA from 2014-2017. Berda has taught at Princeton, NYU, Tel Aviv University and Jindal Global University. She received her PhD from Princeton University; her MA from Tel Aviv University, and her LLB from Hebrew University faculty of Law. She was a practicing Human Rights lawyer, representing clients in Military, District and Supreme courts in Israel. Her most recent book is Living Emergency: Israel's Permit Regime in the West Bank (Stanford University Press, 2017). Berda is currently working on a book manuscript entitled: "The File and the Checkpoint: The Administrative Memory of the British Empire". Her other research projects are about the construction of loyalty of civil servants in Israel and India, the use of emergency laws to shape the political economy of colonial states, and colonial legacies of law and administration that shape contemporary homeland security practices in postcolonial states. She publishes, teaches and speaks on the intersections of sociology of law, bureaucracy and the state, race and racism and sociology of empires.