Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, stands among America’s highest-ranked, most diverse public research universities. The oldest, largest, and top-ranked public university in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area. RUTGERS’ Center for European Studies draws upon faculty in numerous programs and departments, including Italian, French, Russian and Eastern European, Spanish and Portuguese Studies and departments of Political Science and History. The centre focuses on Migration, refugee studies, colonialism, EU studies and authoritarianism. The centre’s civil society oriented approach makes it ideally suited to host one of the ValEUs Foreign Policy Debates, bringing together academics, grassroot activists and policy makers. From close collaboration with the Ideas & Futures communication platform which brings together academic knowledge and grassroot activists experiences, the centre draws expertise in communication which they will bring to the coordination of the ValEUs Newsletter.

Team members

Belinda Davis

Belinda Davis is a professor of history. She earned her PhD at the University of Michigan and works and teaches at the Rutgers University since 1992. She specialized in Modern Germany and Europa, Popular Politics and Women´s and Gnder History. Belinda Davis is author or co-editor of five books, including her forthcoming The Internal Life of Politics: Extraparliamentary Opposition in West Germany, 1962-1983 (CUP), and several dozen articles, on themes including popular politics and social movements; conceptions of democracy and how change takes place; gender; history of everyday life; oral history, memory, and emotion; urban history; transnational history; policing, violence, and terror; and consumption.

Sadia Abbas

Sadia Abbas is an associate professor of postcolonial studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research focusses on postcolonial literature and theory, the culture and politics of Islam in modernity, early modern English literature, and the history of twentieth-century criticism. Abbas is a postcolonial scholar with foci that include South Asia, Islam, Islamophobia and Islam in the Americas and Europe. She currently works on the concept of Europe and the way in which a series of discourses work to produce the (epistemic) borders of Europe and thus spatialized racial divisions. In this border-work, race, Islam, religionized ethnicity, and ethnicized religion are crucial. She works with literary, political, and philosophical texts as well as visual and material culture in numerous regional contexts. She is executive director of Ideas and Futures: A Collaborative for Just and Vibrant Societies, cofounder and co-editor of the associated e-platform, Ideas and Futures and director of the Center for European Studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick.