Academic Convenor & By-Fellow
Roman Vater joined Hughes Hall as By-Fellow in December 2022 and became Academic Convenor in September 2023. From 2018 to 2021 he was a Fellow of St. Edmund’s College and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, where he researched Israeli nationalist anti-Zionism.
After completing his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester in 2015, he was for two years an Israel Institute post-doctoral fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His research focuses above all on the political ideology of the Young Hebrews movement in Israel and its affiliates, all of whom suggested an alternative raison d’etat for Israel based on nativist-nationalist premises.
More broadly he is interested in modern Middle Eastern intellectual and political history, Zionism and anti-Zionism, historical narratives of nation and nationhood, the tension between the civic and the ethnic concept of the nation, and the challenges of national self-determination in modern Israel and the Middle East.
