Ofrath, Avner, Dr
Contact details
Email: avner.ofrathprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de
Phone: 0049 (0)421–218 67239
Office: GW2 building, room B 2230
Research
Avner Ofrath is a historian of citizenship and the public sphere in the Middle East and North Africa.
His first book project explores the colonial origins of modern French citizenship. Focusing on Algeria, the book traces the racialisation of citizenship from the late nineteenth century onwards, showing how religion and ethnicity became crucial legal criteria of political exclusion and inclusion. Drawing on sources in French, Arabic, and Judeo-Arabic, the book demonstrates how Algerians contested this emerging political terminology throughout the colonial period.
His current project investigates the dissolution of the Mediterranean city as site of encounter in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Examining migration, settlement, and urban planning in late-Ottoman and British-colonial Jerusalem, the project analyses the interplay of local, regional, and global forces which restructured the historic, shared public sphere along rigid categories of ethnic-religious ‘minorities’.
His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, and the Society for the Study of French History.
Publications
Monographs:
- Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship (Bloomsbury 2023).
Journal articles and book chapters:
- “’We Shall Become French’: Reconsidering Jewish citizenship in Algeria, c. 1860-1900”, French History, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/craa073.
- “South, North and the Mediterranean.” In The Hinder Sea: Exhibition Catalogue, edited by Roni Cohen-Binyamini, 67-77. Ashdod: Ashdod Museum of Art, 2015 (Hebrew).
- “Von Ostpreußen nach Palästina: Die Erinnerungen des Gideon Cohen. Emigration, Bruch und Auseinandersetzung mit der Vergangenheit,.” In »Das war mal unsere Heimat...« Jüdische Geschichte im preußischen Osten, 101-7. Berlin:Stiftung Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung, 2013.
Translations:
- Sami Adwan et al.: Die Geschichte des Anderen kennen lernen: Israel und Palästina im 20. Jahrhundert. Translated from the Arabic by Imke Ahlf-Wien and from the Hebrew by Avner Ofrath. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag 2015.
Further publications:
- ‘A Question of Sensitivity: The ethical issues posed by the Sophie Hingst case.’European Journalism Observatory, September 4, 2019
- ‘On Leaving the Archive.’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 1 (2017), http://www.oarplatform.com/on-leaving-the-archive/.
- Various articles on European, Mediterranean and world history, Alaxon Digital Magazine (in Hebrew).
Teaching
Street life: Coexistence, protest and violence in the modern city | seminar
Cities have long been an important setting of encounter and exchange between different religions, ethnic communities, social classes, and political movements. At the same time, the major currents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – capitalism and revolution, religious revival and secularism, colonialism and nationalism – exerted a formidable pressure on the modern city as a stie of encounter. As new political movements emerged and rigid collective identities coalesced, the city became the arena in which new rivalries and antagonisms were played out. Looking at different cities along the shores of the Mediterranean, this seminar explores the various, often conflicting dynamics of coexistence, protest, and violence in the modern age.
Outcasts: Citizenship and its boundaries, 1789-2015 | seminar
Every state includes some and excludes others. This highly contested dynamic has been defining our politics, society and culture for two centuries. How universal can citizenship be? Which criteria are seen as legitimate? And which role does this national framework play in an increasingly globalised world? Such questions are to be discussed in this seminar. Starting with the French Revolution, when the distinction between human and civil rights was formulated for the first time, this seminar will discuss the conflicting tendencies of inclusion and exclusion in the national, imperial, and post-colonial context.
Students will be expected to read and comment on complex texts in both German and English.
