Keynote Speaker

Ayelet Shachar is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, where she heads the Ethics, Law, and Politics Department. Previously, she held the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Multiculturalism at the University of Toronto Faculty Law. She earned her doctoral degree in law from Yale and held distinguished visiting professorships at Stanford and Harvard. Her research focuses on citizenship theory, immigration law, cultural diversity, gender equality, talent migration, and new bordering regimes. Shachar is the author of Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women’s Rights (Cambridge)—winner of the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book Award; The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Harvard)—named International Ethics Notable Book in recognition of its “superior scholarship and contribution to the field of international ethics;” and the lead editor of the recently published Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (Oxford). She is the recipient of scholarly excellence awards in three different countries (Canada, Israel, and the United States). In 2014, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC)—the highest academic accolade in that country. In 2015, she joined the Max Planck Society as Director and Scientific Member. In 2017, she was elected Member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities—Germany’s oldest arts and sciences academy.