Principal Research Associate / ERC Principal Investigator

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

Dr Inanna Hamati-Ataya is Principal Research Associate and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded projects ARTEFACT (2017-2023) and NOAH (2022-2023), and founding director of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos).

Dr Hamati-Ataya’s research lies at the intersection(s) of global politics, deep history, social theory, natural and historical epistemology, and the anthropology, history, and sociology of knowledge, science, and technology. Her on-going project ARTEFACT (The Global as Artefact) aims to develop a novel understanding and theorisation of ‘the global’ by examining the constitution and transformation of global political structures from the anthropological perspective of humankind’s epistemic development. Taking as a case-study the emergence and diffusion of four major global agricultural revolutions from the Neolithic to the contemporary era, the project examines the patterns and pathways of socio-epistemic co-constitution and co-evolution that underscore the formation and transformation of increasingly inclusive world systems since human ‘pre-history’. With her forthcoming project NOAH (A New Noah’s Ark), Dr Hamati-Ataya is taking some insights from ARTEFACT to proof of concept. Focusing on the effects of climate change on agricultural production across Europe, NOAH will develop a novel model of technology transfer to secure the preservation of ancestral agricultural knowledges across regions variously affected by anthropogenic climate change.

Dr Hamati-Ataya is the founding editor of the book series Global Epistemics at Rowman & Littlefield, and co-editor, with Arlene B Tickner and David L Blaney, of the Routledge book series Worlding Beyond the West. She sits on the editorial boards of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Social Epistemology, the Journal for the History of Knowledge, and the Journal of International Relations and Development, and is a member of the Social Epistemology Review & Reply Collective (SERRC), and the Advisory Boards of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK) and the Duisburg Centre for Global Cooperation Research.

In the past years she has served as chair of the International Political Sociology section of the International Studies Association, as trustee of the British International Studies Association, and as member of the European International Studies Association’s Governing Council.

Prior to joining CRASSH, Dr Hamati-Ataya was a Marie Curie Fellow under the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2013-17), Reader in International Politics at Aberystwyth University (2013-18), Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield (2011-13), and Assistant Professor of Political and International Theory at the American University of Beirut (2007-11), where she also served as Head of the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration. She holds a BA, MA, and PhD (Doctorat) in Political Science from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she completed her doctoral thesis in October 2006.