Visiting Scholars
Hans Schildermans is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark.
He obtained his doctoral degree from KU Leuven in Belgium with a dissertation on educational-philosophical discourses on the politics of higher education and the social aims of the university. The work of his dissertation was published as the book Experiments in Decolonizing the University: Towards an Ecology of Study, with Bloomsbury in 2021. In his postdoctoral research project A University for the People, funded by the Austrian Science Fund and hosted at the Department of Education at the University of Vienna, he developed a comparative intellectual history of political visions of the future of the university in modern nation-states, drawing on case studies from the United States, Argentina and South Africa. He was a teaching fellow at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
In the framework of his Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship, Hans will be a Visiting Scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University for 24 months starting 1 January 2027. He will be working on a project with the title Academic Freedom in Liberal Democracies: Understanding the Intellectual History of a Contested Concept in Global Networks of Policy. The project will investigate how the value of academic freedom became central to international discourses on higher education during the emergence of the liberal world order. By examining the role of international organizations such as UNESCO as ‘teachers of norms’, the project tracks conceptual shifts within global policy networks. The project connects Hans’s research interests with the work of Professor Gita Steiner-Khamsi, his faculty host, on global governance in education and comparative policy analysis.
Hosting Faculty: Gita Steiner-Khamsi
AY 2024-2026
Avner Rogel joins the Department of International and Transcultural Studies as a visiting scholar and is affiliated with the Global Observatory of LGBTQ+ Education and Advocacy. His research focuses on social change in both formal and informal educational settings, emphasizing the role of educators, activists, and youth as agents of transformation. Rogel earned his doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with his dissertation, supported by the Spencer Foundation, examining queer pedagogies in organizational contexts. He is the founding director of the Magnus Hirschfeld Research Institute, focusing on LGBTQ+ youth in Israel, and co-leads the SOGIE special interest group within the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). At Teachers College, Rogel will study the civic and school involvement of LGBTQ+ youth.
Hosting Faculty: Oren Pizmony-Levy
AY 2025-2027
Dr. Shamo Thar is a multilingual scholar-practitioner in international and comparative education whose work advances equity, inclusion, and belonging among Indigenous and minoritized communities. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at SOAS, University of London. Her research employs ethnographic, qualitative, and secondary analysis of policy, media, and archival sources to explore the intersections of language, identity, society, and education. Her current project examines China’s multilingual education models, with particular attention to bilingual education policies for Tibetans, investigating how language policies are shaped by evolving ideologies of national integration, state-building, and cultural identity.
Dr. Shamo holds a Ph.D. in International Education from the University of Massachusetts
Amherst and an M.A. in Sustainable International Development from Brandeis University. With over a decade of experience in research, teaching, and nonprofit leadership, she has founded and directed educational programs, designed literacy initiatives, and led programs in multicultural and international education centers at U.S. universities. She is also the author of a children’s book rooted in the Tibetan cultural storytelling tradition. Her academic publications include “Tibetan Pastoralists and Schooling: Local Challenges in a Context of Educational Reform” and additional works on education, policy, and language. Her work has been recognized with the Margaret McNamara Education Grant, the Ambassador Synthia Shepard Perry Award, UMass Amherst’s Scholarly Excellence Award, and multiple research grants. She previously served as a Visiting Scholar at Drexel University, where she lectured on education, language, and representations of Tibetan Buddhism in U.S. higher education.
Hosting Faculty: Prem Phyak