Dr. Asaf J. Shamis is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Israel Studies Department at the University of Haifa. Dr. Shamis is a graduate of the Hebrew University [BA in Political Science and International Relations (Magna cum Laude) and MA in Political Science (Magna cum Laude)]. He completed his Ph.D. at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) under the direction of Professors Marshall Berman and Michael Walzer (2014). From 2014 to 2016 he served as a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University.
Dr. Shamis is a political theorist. His scholarly works center on the historical and conceptual relations between political ideas and technology. In his book The Media Environment of Political Thought: Rousseau, Marx and the Politics of Selfies (Lexington Press, 2017), Dr. Shamis offers a novel way of looking at the great political texts of the past by exploring their political content in light of the printing technologies that were originally used to produce them.
Dr. Shamis is currently working on an extensive project in which he aims to provide a first comprehensive account of the place of technology in early Zionist thought. The study explores the role early Zionist thinkers assigned tools, devices and machines in their vision of a Jewish homeland. The research proposes that different notions of technology were constitutive of the structure and premises of early Zionist theories.