Previous Fellows Academic Program

Marta Dell’Aquila is a political philosopher with strong interests in Feminist Philosophy, Political and Gender Theory. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Bologna (2013), and then a Master Degree “Philosophie et Société” from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2015). Subsequently, she gets her PhD in Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2021), with a dissertation centered on women’s agency and autonomy and how they could be reworked from a feminist intersectional perspective (and included in comprehensive public policies).

During her PhD program, she was Visiting PhD Research Fellow at the Center for Gender and Culture Studies in Latin America (CEGECAL) of the University of Chile (2018-2019) and then taught Political Theory at the Institute for Public Affairs (INAP) of the University of Chile (2019-2021).

Recently, she worked as a consultant at the Division for Gender Affairs at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

During her stay at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at the University of Tel Aviv, she will explore the concept of “care economy” and its implications for gender equality.

Born in New York and raised in a village in Israel’s suburban center. My academic jour-ney started at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, with an LL.B. and a B.A. in Gov-ernment, followed by an LL.M in Business Law. My thesis (under the supervision of As-saf Jacob) criticized the myopia and libertarian tendencies of traditional theories of tort law. I developed a special interest in law’s ability to contribute to social justice—in par-ticular, while coordinating a busy legal aid project at the Tel Aviv District Court. This in-terest manifested itself in academic writing: I co-authored the theoretical chapters of a book about multiculturalism in Israel and an article about human dignity and criminal pro-cedure.

My next step was an LL.M. in Legal Theory at New York University as an Arthur T. Vanderbilt scholar. My academic interest expended to political and moral theory. I wrote my thesis (under the supervision of Liam Murphy) about tensions between public and private in private law theory. I ended up receiving the David H. Moses Prize for the LL.M. student with the highest GPA (which I used to buy a few dinners for me and my friends, a nice jacket, and a ticket for a flight that I missed by an hour because of a snow storm).

​I crossed the Atlantic Ocean to write a doctorate in law at the University of Ox-ford as a Reuben scholar. My thesis (under the supervision of Hugh Collins) conducts a philosophical analysis of the relations between constitutional rights and private law. It reflects my growing interest in moral pluralism—especially the conflicts between teleolo-gy and deontology—and theories of rights. This interest materialized during the first Covid lockdown in an article (written between baking sessions and field trips) about the normative structure of abstract constitutional rights (for example, to dignity, privacy, or health).

My main goal is to find ways to expose market, family, and other private activities and relationships to reform-oriented scrutiny, adopting consequentialist forms of reason-ing and evaluation; but to do so without eroding or distorting the values inherent in them and their unique normativity. I see great potential, in this regard, in understanding the state’s responsibilities with regard to regulation and its ability to shape our responsibilities as private agents: topics I intend to further explore during my year at the Safra Center. 

Miklos Zala received his PhD in Political Theory from Central European University. His research focuses on political philosophy and applied ethics. During his doctoral studies, he was a visiting researcher at Aarhus University, Roskilde University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His doctoral thesis, titled "The Devout and the Disabled: Religious and Cultural Accommodation as Human Variation" examined the case of religious and cultural accommodation from an original point of view. The thesis argued that certain religious and cultural accommodations can be explained and justified by a particular disability accommodation model, the Human Variation Model.

Before joining the Safra Center, he was affiliated with the Center for European Union Research (CEUR) at Central European University, working on the European Commission-supported H2020 project ETHOS—a theory of European justice and the Centre for Social Sciences-Institution for Political Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence. His research project at the Safra Center focuses on urban (in)justice: the moral concerns regarding gated communities and identifying the wrongness of gentrification.

Debadatta Bose is a doctoral researcher under the Sustainable Global Economic Law project of the University of Amsterdam, which is a cross-cutting project across the disciplinary boundaries of international law, private law and European public law.

Debadatta’s research focuses on the business and human rights issue of conceptualising corporate responsibility for entities directly linked to human rights impacts. He places reliance on the theoretical framework of relational justice to analyse human rights due diligence as a means of corporate responsibility with an interpretive normative approach.

At the University of Amsterdam, Debadatta is involved in teaching the International Law and Sustainable Development, and International Investment Law courses at the LL.M. level.

He received his LL.M. in International and European Union Law from Erasmus University Rotterdam (cum laude) with the first rank in the International Law track. He was also the first-rank holder (gold medallist) in the 5-year B.A., LL.B. (Honours) degree from the Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University in India.