Haviva Pedaya is professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University. She heads the Elyachar Center for Studies in Sephardi Heritage and is the incumbent of the Matanel Foundation on the Ben Gurion University campus, and holds the Estelle S. Frankfurter Chair in Sephardic Studies. Prof. Pedaya is chair of the committee to promote the humanities in Israel at the Council for Higher Education (CHE) - Planning and Budgeting Committee, and chair of the CHE's Sephardic and Mizrahi Heritage team (on the 13th and now the 14th Council). In this framework she headed the Program of the Century to rehabilitate the humanities and led to the recognition of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish Studies as an independent discipline. She is also a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Prof. Pedaya has published 15 books of poetry and prose, several of which won awards, among them the Harry Harshon Award, the Warburg Prize, the Bernstein Prize for Poetry (1997) and the President's Prize for Poetry (2004). For her studies on Kabbalah she won the Gershom Scholem Prize (2018).