CV

Adi Livny is the academic coordinator of the international project The Historical Archive of the Hebrew University: German-Jewish Knowledge and Cultural Transfer, 1918-1948, a collaboration between the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre and the Deutsche Literatur Archiv in Marbach, supported by the Greda Henkel Foundation.
Adi is a PhD candidate at the department for the History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewry, a recipient of the Hebrew University’s President’s Scholarship for outstanding Doctoral Students (2015) and a fellow of the "Da'at Hamakom" I-Core Center (2014-2015). Adi earned her BA and MA from the department of Political Science at the Hebrew University. her MA thesis “Conscientious Objection and the State: between Confrontation and Recognition” (2013) dealt with the policy towards objection to military service in Israel, Germany and Switzerland during the second half of the 20th century.

Research Project

Adi’s dissertation - “The Windows of This House Shall Be Open to the Four Winds of the Heavens": A Spatial History of the Hebrew University (1925-1948)- is written under the supervision of Prof. Yfaat Weiss. It explores the university’s existence as a Western agent in an Oriental environment and as an agent of nationalism in a pre-state era. While scholars and intellectuals stand at its center, the research’s concern is not with intellectual history, but rather with a history of the university as an institution, focusing on its policies and practices, rather on the knowledge it produced.

In particular, the project explores the spatial aspects of the university’s activity, focusing on different spheres: in Palestine, examining the institution’s influence on the land and people in its immediate environment; in the Middle East, examining its relations and connections with other educational institutions around the region; and within the British Empire, examining the university alongside other educational institutions under British auspices.

Selected Publications

- „Raketengetrieben: Wie die post-israelische Generation um ihr Leben kämpft“, Kursbuch 181 (March 2015): 117-130.

- “‘An Order is an Order?’ Conscientious Objection in Cold War West Germany” Hayo Haya: A Young Forum for History 10 (2014): 94-113 [in Hebrew].