Lea David is an Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin. Her work examines the globalization of human rights and memory politics, and their impact on nationalist ideologies in post and in-conflict settings. Her main research and teaching interests cover the interconnectedness of sociology of human rights and memory politics, nationalism and nation-state; human-object relations; ideology; solidarity; historical sociology; qualitative research methods; the Holocaust/Genocide nexus; the Balkan and the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts. She has held various postdoc fellowships including a fellowship in Holocaust Studies, the Fulbright Fellowship, the prestigious Jonathan Shapira fellowship at Tel Aviv University, the Israeli Council fellowship for outstanding scholars, and a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the School of Sociology at UCD. Her book manuscript “The Past Can’t Heal Us! The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights” published with Cambridge University Press (2020) was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association best book award, and was awarded the Honourable Mention for the 2021 ASA Sociology of Human Rights Gordon Hirabayashi Award. Her second book “A Victim’s Shoe, a Broken Watch and Marbles: Desire Objects and Human Rights” is published in 2025 with Columbia University Press.
Articles
Organized Callousness: Gaza & the Sociology of War*
Introduction The ongoing war in Gaza has generated extensive polemic among scholars and the general public.1 Some have described this conflict as a novel form of warfare. The deeply asymmetric character of this war and the vast number of Palestinian civilian casualties have prompted some analysts to described Gaza as a “new urban warfare.”2 Others… Read More »