Natalia Donner
Natalia studied archaeology because she thinks it is an excellent tool for looking at things; we people love objects, we take them with us when we travel or we migrate, we pass them on from generation to generation. We need stuff to make a place feel like home, we trash things when they are not useful anymore, or when they remind us of something unpleasant. Her discipline allows her to research these choices and see how relations of power intersect them. Therefore, before joining BAIS she did her PhD at the Faculty of Archaeology (Leiden University), where she created a chronological narrative of central Nicaragua (AD 400-present), critically assessing how my discipline conceptualizes and organizes time. Nowadays, she is leading a project in Panama, where she is studying the deep history of human trajectories in the Darién province, the only land bridge that connects the Americas. Natalia is in love with her career because it allows her to fulfil all her passions: traveling, exposing herself to new cultures and ways of looking at the world and our place in it, exploring, trekking, and sharing unforgettable moments with very diverse people. For her, teaching is a collaborative endeavour, so at BAIS, she expects not only to share her experiences and knowledge, but also to challenge her own worldviews and get inspired by her students.

Teodora Muis Gaidyte
Teodora comes from a small Baltic country, Lithuania, where she studied political science. Her research interests are political culture, social and political attitudes, democratization and democracy in Eastern Europe, political and economic inequality. Before joining BAIS as a tutor, she was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Sociology department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Within the POLPART project (“How citizens try to influence politics, and why? International comparisons of movement and party politics”), she was responsible for collecting cross-national data and conducting comparative studies on different forms of political participation. During the years in academia, she discovered her passion in teaching. She is very eager to teach students and motivate them to improve their abilities. She is especially happy to be involved in the programme of International Studies because of its interdisciplinary, multi-cultural nature and she hopes to contribute to the programme by not only teaching students didactical skills, but also encouraging them to build the bridges across their different cultural backgrounds and worldviews.  

Pelin Onar Valk
Pelin is a linguist from İzmir, Turkey who completed her PhD project at Tilburg University with a specialization in Turkish, more specifically on contact-induced language change in immigrant Turkish spoken in the Netherlands. Before that, she studied third language acquisition (L3A) by bilinguals speakers in the Linguistics programme of Utrecht University. While she has a strong motivation in research and science, she has great enthusiasm for teaching, too. She taught ‘second language acquisition’, ‘English language teaching’ methodology and ‘English language skills’ courses at the iPabo University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam before starting her journey here at International Studies. Prior to that, she taught English to adults, university level students and pupils at private schools. She has also done some private tutoring. In addition to having an international background herself, she worked at international companies and other environments (e.g. Canon Europe in Amsterdam, etc.), at very communication-related positions, with more than 49 nationalities with different cultures. With this experience in pedagogy, teaching and work, she has immediately gained a sense of belonging in the department of International Studies. She believes and feels that it is the right place to be for her and is extremely motivated and happy to be a part of this great team!

Brian Shaev
Brian is pleased to join the BA international studies program this semester. Since 2017, he has been university lecturer in history and international relations in Leiden, where he has taught in the BA history, European Union Studies, and MA international relations programs. From this semester he has a dual appointment at international studies in the Hague and at History and International Relations in Leiden. Before coming to Leiden, he earned a PhD in history at the University of Pittsburgh and then was international research fellow at New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania, postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for European Research at Gothenburg University (CERGU) in Sweden, and visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He has researched and published widely on the history of social democracy and European integration and is currently writing a book, Transnational Socialism and European Integration: Political Economy and Ideas of Democracy in the early European Communities. In the BA international studies program he will teach sections of Global History. He is eager to teach and learn from students enthusiastic to understand the origins and development of our contemporary international system and global economy and to contemplate together how we may improve international cooperation between peoples and face the enormous global challenges that lie before us in the 21^stcentury.

Daniel Stumm
Daniel came to BAIS straight from his PhD at Leiden University. He analysed how Chinese scholars read the classical texts in the 18^th century, a time when advanced philological methods made it clear that these texts probably contained later insertions. How did this affect the authority of these works? His broader area of expertise is the intellectual history of China between the 17^th and the 20^th century, with a focus on the reception of classical texts within an ever-changing socio-political framework. In his classes, Daniel hopes to explore with students how seemingly small abstract differences in perspective can have tangible consequences in our lives.

Pelin, Daniel, Natalia, Brian and Teodora