The Institute "Mediterranean Societies in Transition" (SoMuM) has an Advisory Board of six members, equally composed of men and women.
Appointed by the Board of Directors, the members of this body meet once a year. Their role is consultative: recommendations on the development of training-research links within the Institute, setting up partnerships with the socio-economic world and with foreign universities, international visibility of the "Mediterranean Societies in Transition" (SoMuM) Institute.
Composition of the Advisory Board
Brigitte Marin
Brigitte Marin is Historian and Professor of Modern History at Aix-Marseille University and Director of Studies at EHESS. She is currently Director of the French School of Rome. She directed the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l'homme (2009-2017) and coordinated the LabexMed Laboratory of Excellence "Human and Social Sciences at the heart of interdisciplinarity for the Mediterranean" (2011-2019). A specialist in the urban, social and cultural history of modern Italy, she has published several studies on the history of cities in Southern Europe in the modern age, with particular reference to Naples in the 18th century.
Imed Melliti
Imed Melliti is Sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences in Tunis (Tunis El Manar University). He is currently Vice-President of the International Association of Sociologists of the French Language (AISLF). Imed Melliti is the author of several publications on holiness, religion, youth and the history of social sciences in the Maghreb and Tunisia (he directed the collective work "La fabrique du sens. Ecrire en sciences sociales" in 2017). He is an associate researcher at the Institute for Research on the Contemporary Maghreb (IRMC), where he has conducted a research programme on feelings of injustice and the definition of the common good in relation to the political dynamics of the "Arab Spring". He is also a member of the ERC Tarica.
Kalypso Nicolaïdis
Kalypso Nicolaïdis is a Politician and Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she was Director of the Centre for European Studies (Saint Anthony's College). She has been a member of the RAMSESII network coordinated by the MMSH and knows Aix-Marseille University well. She chaired the International Advisory Group of Experts on the Convention on the Future of Europe and has also worked with the European Commission. She has published extensively on the institutional and constitutional debates of the European Union (EU), the EU's external relations, including with Mediterranean countries and the United States, issues of identity, justice and cooperation in the international system, sources of legitimacy of European and global governance, the relationship between trade and regulation, trade in services, and preventive diplomacy and dispute settlement.
Brian RAY
Brian Ray is a Geographer and Professor of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Ottawa. He is the Vice-Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts. After several years in the United States where he worked as a researcher and policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., he was a senior analyst with the Metropolis Project and the Policy, Planning and Strategic Analysis Branch of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, as well as a professor at McGill University. His research interests in urban and environmental geography include the issue of housing and home ownership for poor and immigrant populations, gender inequalities, and the geographic dimensions of employment in large cities. The Faculty of Arts at his university has granted him a sabbatical year from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2021, part of which he will spend at the SoMuM Institute.
Francesco Zappa
Francesco Zappa is an Islamologist, Associate Professor of Islamology and History of Islamic Civilization at the University of Roma La Sapienza (Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali). His work focuses on Islam in Western Sub-Saharan Africa and on the role of the Bambara language (Bamanankan) as an "Islamic language", studied through an analysis of its oral and written uses. He carried out several field research missions in Mali between 2000 and 2010. His approach combines the historical-philological methodology of classical Islamism with that of anthropology, oral studies and linguistics. Francesco Zappa knows Aix-Marseille University very well, having trained and taught there. He is a member of the European Civic University (CIVIS).
A final member is in the process of being appointed.