Atalia Omer is Assistant Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies and serves as a faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include the theoretical study of the interrelation between religion and nationalism; religion, nationalism, and peacebuilding; the role of national, religious, and ethnic diasporas in the dynamics of conflict transformation and peace; multiculturalism as a framework for conflict transformation and as a theory of justice; the role of subaltern narratives in reimagining questions of peace and justice; intra-group dialogue and the contestation of citizenship in ethno-religious national contexts; and the symbolic appropriation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in other zones of conflict.

Professor Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press), a work that examines how the Israeli peace camp addresses interrelationships between religion, ethnicity, and nationality and how it interprets justice vis-à-vis the Palestinian conflict. Professor Omer is also the author of Religious Nationalism Handbook (ABC-CLIO), and co-editor (with Scott Appleby and David Little) of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press). She has published articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Political Theology, and in The Study of Nationalism and Ethnicity. Her current book project, Rethinking “Home” Abroad: Religion and the Reinterpretation of National Boundaries in the Diasporas, explores why divergences in conceptions of national identity between “homeland” and “diasporas” could facilitate the proliferation of loci of analysis and foci of peacebuilding efforts which are yet under-explored both in Peace Studies and specific scholarship addressing the relations between diasporas and conflict. Her numerous awards and fellowships include a doctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University (2002-2004), a Harvard University Merit Fellowship (2006), serving as a Graduate Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University (2006-2008), and a Charlotte W. Newcombe’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2007).