Visiting Scholars

Lea Laura Heim is a PhD candidate at the European University Viadrina's Chiellino Research Unit for Literature and Migration in Frankfurt (Oder) and is currently a Sylvia Naish Visiting Scholar at the ILCS. She completed her studies in German Literature and European Ethnology at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and at Marmara University, Istanbul. She pursued her Master’s degree in Literary Studies at the European University Viadrina and during this period spent a year at Lancaster University. Addressing contemporary themes in the German literary field, such as experiences of social and structural marginalisation due to attributed origin, gender, and class, her research investigates the literary strategies writers use to counter these exclusions on an artistic-aesthetic level. Her PhD project investigates the aesthetic practices in novels by Fatma Aydemir, Deniz Ohde, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, and Olivia Wenzel, focusing on how they express social criticism, challenge common reception habits, and oppose the burden of representation while demanding discursive participation. [October 2023-July 2024]

Sofía Medina López is an early career researcher at the University of Valencia. She is member of LENA research group (North American Ethnic Literatures in a Global context) and of the NAPCED research group in educational innovation, both at the University of Valencia. She is currently completing her PhD thesis which focuses on how eating disorders serve as coping mechanisms in a transethnic background. Her research interests encompass a wide range of topics, including gender studies, diaspora, post-colonialism, Caribbean female authors, trauma studies and medical humanities in particular eating disorders. She is interested in Critical Pedagogy and innovation in education as she is also a Secondary School teacher. [January-April 2024]

Alejandro Ponce de León is a Colombian editor and researcher. He is the founding editor of the Plataforma Latinoamericana de Humanidades Ambientales, an online editorial collective that promotes dialogues on environmental thought, arts, and education throughout the Americas. His work stands at the intersection of environmental humanities and technoscience studies and has been published in Cultural Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, ASAP/J, Humanidades: Revista de la Universidad de Montevideo, Revista Tabula Rasa, Revista Endémico, Diffractions, Tapuya, and Sociological Forum, among others. Alejandro holds a Master's degree in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. [April-November 2024]

Mario Badagliacca studied international relations and politics at the University 'L'Orientale' in Naples and photo-reportage and photojournalism in Rome. Alongside his photographic activity, he has collaborated with non-profit organisations and NGOs involved in humanitarian programmes. His work documents migration, life on the borders, human rights violations, and social issues, and has been exhibited in international venues, including the Hopkins Hall Gallery in the USA. He has worked with international research and academic institutions such as New York University, Oxford University, St Andrews University and San Diego State University. Badagliacca has been the recipient of several international awards, including the Documentary Photography Audience Engagement Grant (New York, 2014) for his project Letters from the CIE, and the 2017 ACEP Projecto Media exhibited at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. His book Italy is Out, co-edited with Derek Duncan, is the result of the research conducted as an artist-in-residence for the Transnationalizing Modern Languages(Opens in new window) project  sponsored by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. The volume focuses on the Italian diasporic communities in Addis Ababa, London, New York, Buenos Aires and Tunis. Currently he is a PhD candidate in Culture Sciences at the University of Palermo. In his doctoral project, he investigates the role digital and visual media play in Italian diaspora networks. [April-July 2023]

Franziska Wolf is a PhD candidate in German Studies at the Institute for German and European Studies (IGES) at the University of Birmingham. She currently works as a Teaching Fellow in German in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her doctoral research offers a comparative investigation of so-called German exile literature and contemporary German migrant literature. Franziska analyses how different minority groups are discriminated against in Lion Feuchtwanger’s Wartesaal-trilogy (1930-40) and Abbas Khider’s two novels Der falsche Inder (2008) and Ohrfeige (2016) with a particular focus on Bavaria and Berlin. During her stay at the Institute as a Sylvia Naish Visiting Scholar, she will examine attempts to decolonise and diversify German Studies, especially within the realm of the post-migrant paradigm [August 2022].

Marlen Mairhofer read German Language and Literature at the Paris Lodron University Salzburg (PLUS) from 2009 to 2015. Following her graduation, she was a Teaching Fellow at the German Department at PLUS and a Research Assistant at the Salzburg Stefan Zweig Centre. From April to October 2018, she held the Marie-Andeßner Fellowship, awarded by PLUS to outstanding doctoral students, and since then has continued work on her doctorate on the body and writing in Ingeborg Bachmann, Marlen Haushofer and Hélène Cixous whilst serving as University Assistant for Modern German Literature at PLUS. Mairhofer was a Visiting Research Student at the German Department of the University of Durham from January to March 2020. Her research interests include literature and psychoanalysis, feminist and deconstructive (literary) theory, 20th- and 21st-century Austrian literature. She is active in literary societies in Salzburg, and has organised readings, workshops and exhibitions, as well as editing the literary magazine mosaik. Mairhofer has won prizes for her own writing, which has been published in anthologies and the magazines Sterz, Salz and Die Rampe, and broadcast by Austrian State Radio Ö1. [April-June 2022]

Franziska Wolf is a PhD candidate in German Studies at the Institute for German and European Studies (IGES) at the University of Birmingham. She currently works as a Teaching Fellow in German in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway University of London. Her doctoral research offers a comparative investigation of so-called German exile literature and contemporary German migrant literature. Franziska analyses how different minority groups are discriminated against in Lion Feuchtwanger’s Wartesaal-trilogy (1930-40) and Abbas Khider’s two novels Der falsche Inder (2008) and Ohrfeige (2016) with a particular focus on Bavaria and Berlin. During her stay as a Sylvia Naish Visiting Scholar, she will examine attempts to decolonise and diversify German Studies, especially within the realm of the post-migrant paradigm [January-June 2022].

Emilia Ziosi is a PhD student in Studies on Organized Crime at the University of Milan and a Visiting Student at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). Her research focuses on the influence of social, political and economic factors on organised crime in Honduras. Her research interests include the relations between organised crime, the state and civil society, as well as the interconnections between legal and illegal governance. Emilia also holds a BSc in Economics and Management from the University of Trento, and a MSc in Organised Crime, Terrorism and Security from the University of Essex where she conducted research on the perceptions of insecurity and fear of gang violence in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. [October 2021-June 2022] 

Josh Torabi is a PhD candidate in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (German) at University College London and is currently a part-time Teaching Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Richmond, the American International University in London. His doctoral thesis focuses on representations of music and myth, and the relationship between the two, from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy to Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Part of his research was carried out in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where he was an Exchange Scholar. Most recently he was the recipient of a two-month scholarship from the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. [January-June 2020]

Eduardo Ho-Fernández is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. While at the School of Advanced Study in London he will work on the diachronic change observed in Spanish poems written by bilingual Portuguese authors during the Iberian Union (1560-1640) and on documenting the ideas of Erasmus present in the Diálogo de la lengua (c. 1535) by Juan de Valdés. [June 2019]

Maren Rohe is Sylvia Naish Visiting Scholar at the Institute. She is currently working on a PhD with the working title Constructing the Other. Polish and Russian Narratives on Germany between Individuality and Media Influence at the University of Birmingham. During her stay, she will be using the Germanic Studies Library to revise and expand her literature review and theoretical framework, focusing on the narrative construction of Otherness. [September-December 2019]

Bodi Wang is a PhD student and Research Assistant at the TU Dortmund. For her undergraduate degree, she studied philosophy at the Renmin University of China and completed her Master's degree at the University of Heidelberg. In 2016, she started her PhD research under the supervision of Professor Christian Neuhäuser focusing on the epistemic problem of social integration. The Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung has supported her research with a doctoral scholarship since 2017. Her research interests include philosophy of history, social philosophy (especially critical theory) and analytical philosophy with particular focus on ethics/politics of knowledge. She will conduct her research project under the supervision of Dr Johan Siebers at the Bloch Centre for German Thought. [September 2018-February 2019]

S.A. Smythe is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing and currently completing a PhD in History of Consciousness called 'L'Italia Meticcia: Belonging and Blackness in Postcolonial Italy' along with concentrations in Literature and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. During her stay at the Institute, she will further explore themes of migritude, blackness, and gender identity in 20th- and 21st century Italian-East African writing. [October 2015-June 2016]

Ann-Christin Bolay is a Sylvia Naish Visiting Scholar at the Institute. She is writing a PhD on 'Heroization strategies in the biographies of the Stefan George Circle’ at the Collaborative Research Center 948 'Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms’ at the University of Freiburg, Germany. During her stay she will be studying the Institute’s archive materials relating to the German author and literary scholar Friedrich Gundolf. As one of the most important members and biographers of the George Circle, he had an important influence on the Circle’s veneration of heroes. Her main focus is the question of how this veneration is constructed through narrative strategies. [September-October 2014]

Carmen Donia is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory and a member of the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the University of Padua. Her PhD project concerns encyclopedism and vernacular Aristotelianism in the XVIth Academies of the Venetian Republic. During her stay at the Institute, she will explore the relationship between language and visual memory in the Accademia degli Infiammati (1540-45), focusing on the work by Giuseppe Betussi (1512– c. 1573). She was awarded the Vittore Branca Scholarship at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and carried out research at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. She has published an essay and run conferences on Renaissance Italian studies. [September-December 2013 / March-May 2014]

Valérie Lebrun is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing and is pursuing a PhD in the Department of Literature Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal along with a concentration in Feminist Studies at the Institut de recherches et d’études féministes (IREF). During her stay at the Institute, she will develop her work on what she calls 'Antigone’s Girls' to theorize the link between tragic performance in the voices of female figures and the renewal of love discourses in contemporary women's writing. She is especially interested in the works of Christine Angot, Nelly Arcan, Camille Laurens and Catherine Mavrikakis. [January-June 2014]

Fabiana Loparco is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory and a doctoral student in History of Education at the University of Macerata. She is conducting research on the periodical press for children in Italy between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is the author of one volume about children and war, The Corriere dei Piccoli and World War I, and other articles published in international journals. During her stay, she will explore the history of English and Italian children’s periodical press during the late 19th century as an important means in understanding National educational processes. [September 2013]

Victoria Richardson is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing, and a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on contemporary French women's writing and the visual arts. Whilst at the Institute, she will develop her research into the writers Marie NDiaye and Marie Darrieussecq, with particular focus on sense perception and the role of the visual arts in their work. [October 2013-July 2014]

Jenny Watson is a Sylvia Naish Visiting Scholar at the Institute and is writing a PhD at Swansea University entitled ‘Metaphor, Memory and the Weight of History in the Writing of Herta Müller’. Whilst at the Institute, she will develop her work on Müller and the legacy of National Socialism to investigate the transnational nature of literature concerned with the Nazi past. The primary focus of this research will be the production of Väterliteratur and other texts of generational conflict in Romania during the 1960s-1980s. [October-November 2013]

Dana Bönisch lectures as a researcher in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn. Her PhD project explores narratives of terror(ism) from the 1970s until the 'war on terror'. During her stay at the Institute, she will explore the notion of geopoetics and the role of spatiality and visuality in this context. She has published a novel and short fiction, occasionally works as a freelance cultural critic, and lives in Cologne. [September 2012-May 2013]

Jennifer Clare is a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. She studied Cultural Sciences, Literature and Musicology at the University of Hildesheim, and is currently working on a PhD project on the interplay of writing and political, social and cultural action within the literature of the German Student Movement. Her main research interests focus on the sociology of literature, especially the interrelation of literature and political violence, such as terrorism or revolution.  At the Institute, her project will deal with references to Vormärz and the 1848 revolution in fiction and literary discourse around 1968 in Germany. [February-April 2012]

Anika Meier  is a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute. She studied German literature and art history at the University of Heidelberg, and is currently writing her dissertation on 'Poetry of Silence. Stefan George’s Images as a Paradigm of Aesthetic Conservatism'. She is also a Fellow at the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, and co-editor of artefakt - Zeitschrift für junge Kunstgeschichte und Kunst. [February/March 2012]

Catherine Moir is a Sylvia Naish Scholar at the Institute. She is currently completing a PhD entitled 'Religion without God? Towards a Blochian Critique of East German Folk Atheism' at the University of Sheffield's Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies. She has published on the translation of religious texts and on religion and atheism in the former East Germany. During her stay, she will work in collaboration with Johan Siebers on the relationship between translation and Utopia. [November 2011]