Dr. Keren Friedman-Peleg is a senior lecturer at the School of Behavioral Science, and the Dean of students at the College of Management – Academic Studies, Israel. She obtained her PhD in Tel-Aviv University, in the department of Sociology and Anthropology, under the supervision of Prof. Yoram Bilu and Prof. Moshe Shokeid (2009).

Friedman-Peleg was a visiting scholar at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2016), and a visiting assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology and of the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley (2018). Based on her ethnographic research at non-profit organizations in Israel – NATAL (The Israeli Center for Victims of Terror and War) and ITC (Israel Trauma Coalition) – she published articles about the intersection between clinical questions of diagnosis, treatment and prevention and socio-political questions of national belonging and ethnic inequality in leading journals, such as Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry and Transcultural Psychiatry (with Y. Bilu). The full manuscript of her doctoral thesis – entitled “A Nation on the Couch: The Politics of Trauma in Israel” was published by Magnes – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Press (2014), and by the University of Toronto Press (2017). Her new manuscript, “National Security, Emergency Preparedness, and the Psychological Project of ‘Building Resilience’: Governance and Cultural Mediation on the Border of Israel and Gaza” is currently under review by University of Pennsylvania Press.

Research Interests: Anthropology of the Therapeutic Discourse, Security-related Trauma and Resilience, Nationalism, Ethnicity and Inequality

Teaching: Introduction to Anthropology, Qualitative Research Methods, Contemporary Theories of Culture, Anthropology of the Therapeutic Discourse