We are delighted to announce the appointment of five new Governors of the Centre – three of them women:
Dr Sondra Hausner
Dr Sondra Hausner is University Lecturer in the Study of Religion at Oxford. Her primary teaching interests are social and cultural theories of religion, and her primary research interests are religion in diaspora, ritual dynamics, pilgrimage and religious practice and experience. She has also worked in public policy, particularly on the issues of migration and gender in Himalayan South Asia. She is affiliated with Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), and is Fellow and Tutor in the Study of Religion at St Peter’s College.
Dr Laurent Mignon
Dr Laurent Mignon is University Lecturer in Turkish at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College. Before joining Oxford in 2011, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Turkish Literature at the University of Bilkent in Ankara (Turkey). He completed his BA and his PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Turkish literature, minority literature, socialist literature, biblical themes in modern Turkish literature and modern Jewish intellectual history.
Dr Deborah Sandler
Dr Deborah Sandler has been director of the visiting student programme at Wadham College, Oxford, since 2005. Prior to that she was a senior research fellow at St Catherine’s College and a member of the Oxford law faculty, specializing in public international law. She consults on a range of international environmental and human-rights projects, with focus on the Middle East water crisis. Dr Sandler has a BA from George Washington University, a JD (law) from the University of California, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford (Wolfson College). She is a member of the California and the Israeli bar associations, and is a citizen of Britain, Israel and the United States.
Michael Ullmann
Michael Ullmann is Chairman of Prodigy Finance and has been involved in more than 40 different entrepreneurial businesses in various capacities. He has been an affiliate professor in entrepreneurship at INSEAD, the European graduate business school where he helped the Entrepreneurship Department. He has an MA from St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, and an MBA from INSEAD. He has been a fellow of St Catherine’s and is active in Israel affairs and the Israel Diaspora Trust.
Anne Webber
Anne Webber is Co-Chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which she co-founded in 1999, and Director of the Central Registry on Looted Cultural Property 1933-1945. She is a member of the UK government delegation on the International Commission of the International Tracing Service (ITS) and chairs the UK ITS Stakeholder Group. She is President of the Jewish Book Council and of Jewish Book Week and a member of the Centre’s Library Committee. She is a former BBC Television documentary producer and director.