News

News

Appointment / Career

2024

  • Jin-Heon Jung | Professor at the National Institute for Unification Education, Ministry of Unification, Korea
  • Farhan Samanani | Lecturer in Social Justice at the King’s College London

2023

  • Arndt-Walter Emmerich | Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Hertfordshire
  • Annelies Kusters | Professor of Sociolinguistics at the School of Social Sciences at the Heriot-Watt University
  • Christine Lang | Assistant professor in Social Geography and Reflexive Migration Studies at Osnabrück University
  • Damian Omar Martinez | Research Fellow “María Zambrano” at the Department of Sociology, University of Murcia (Spain)
  • Sabine Mohamed | Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University
  • Raphael Susewind | Associate Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science

2022

  • Irfan Ahmad | Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Sociology at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, Turkey
  • Elisabeth Badenhoop | Assistant Professor at the School of Human and Social Sciences in the University of Wuppertal
  • Felix Bender | Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics at Northumbria University
  • Benjamin Boudou | Professor of Political Science at the University of Rennes 1, France (starting in Sep. 2022)
  • Bouke de Vries | Ambizione Fellow (Principal Investigator) Zürich University
  • Alan Gamlen | Professor at the Australian National University
  • Jifeng Liu | Visiting Scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University (August 2022 - August 2023)
  • Jin-Heon Jung | Guest Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Yosei University, South Korea
  • Scott Maclochlainn | Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University
  • Neena Mahadev | Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) in Columbia University
  • Sabine Mohamed | Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University
  • Farhan Samanani | Research Fellow at University College London
  • Yang Shen | Assistant Professor in Anthropology and One-Hundred-Talent Researcher at Zhejiang University,  China
  • Michael Stasik  | Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel
  • Xiaoxuan Wang | Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • Chris White | Assistant Director in the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University
  • Sakura Yamamura | Associate Professor at the RWTH Aachen University

2021

  • Felix Bender | Postdoc research fellow at the RIPPLE (Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven) at the KU Leuven
  • Benjamin Boudou | Research fellow and scientific coordinator of the Leibniz Research Group “Transformations of Citizenship” hosted in the center Normative Orders at the Goethe University Frankfurt
  • Annalisa Butticci | Assistant Professor at the Georgetown University in the department of Theology and Religious Studies
  • Ciulia Carabelli | Assistant Professor in Social Theory at Queen Mary University of London
  • Tzu-Lung Chiu | Postdoc researcher at the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Ministry of Science Technology Center for the Advancement of the Humanities / Social Sciences national Taiwan University
  • Lucas G. Drouhot | Assistant Professor of Sociology at Utrecht University
  • Arndt Emmerich | Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology at the University of Heidelberg
  • Jiazhi Fengjiang | Assistant Professor at the University of Edinburgh in the School of Social and Political Science
  • Eijiro Hazama | Researcher and lecture at the School of Human Cultures, The University of Shiga Prefecture, Japan
  • Alexander Horstmann | Guest Professor at SDAC, Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen 2021-22 and Guest Professor at UNESCO Chair of Peace Studies, University Jaume I, Castellón, Spain
  • Nicole Iturriaga | Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society
  • Jin-Heon Jung | Professor at National Institute for Unification Education, Korea
  • Christine Lang | Research fellow at the Institute of Geography and the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at the University of Osnabrueck
  • Samuel Lengen | Scientific Officer at the Innosuisse (Swiss Innovation Agency), Bern
  • Jifeng Liu | Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Xiamen University
  • Sabine Mohamed | Postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the department of Anthropology
  • Mareike Riedel | Lecturer at Macquarie Law School at Macquarie University in Sydney
  • Dora Sampaio | Assistant Professor of Human Geography (Transnational Mobilities and Wellbeing) at Utrecht University
  • Samuel David Schmid | Researcher and lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland
  • Yang Shen | Frieberg Post-Doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,  Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies
  • Magdalena Suerbaum | Researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies (IZG) at the University of Bielefeld
  • Siqi Tu | Postdoctoral Fellow for Global Perspectives in Society at New York University Shanghai
  • Arpita Roy | Faculty member at the University of Michigan Science, Technology & Society
  • Patricia Ward | Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Center for Integration Studies, TU-Dresden
  • Jingyang YuConsultant at the emcra (Consulting company in the field of EU funding), Berlin

Awards

  • Julia Martínez-Ariño was awarded the 2023 ISSR (International Society for Science and Religion) Best Book Award for her book "Urban Secularism."
  • Ke-hsien Huang was awarded the ICAS Book Prize of Chinese Language Edition 2023 for his book  “危殆生活:無家者的社會世界與幫助網絡 (Precarious Living: Homeless People and the Helping Networks in Taiwan)“ 春山出版有限公司 SpringHill Publishing Ltd., 2021.
  • Beatriz Aragon was awarded a First book Grant by the independent social research foundation (ISRF) in 2022 https://www.isrf.org/2022/12/21/fbg1-and-isf9-awards-announcement/ 
  • Thi Ngoc Vuong was awarded a Ph.D. degree at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in Dec. 2022, for a dissertation, entitled “Strangers Made Intimate: Contemporary ethnic relations and everyday politics in a Sino-Vietnamese border commune”, under supervision of Dr Tam Ngo, Dr Peter van der Veer and Dr Eric Venbrux.
  • Salah Punathil received the Chancellor’s Award for Contribution in Research and Teaching at the University of Hyderabad (India) in 2022.
  • Sahana Udupa received Joan Shorenstein Fellowship awarded by Harvard University for her research on digital extreme speech, artificial intelligence and the autonomy of factchecking in 2021. https://shorensteincenter.org/maria-ressa-sahana-udupa-named-fall-2021-joan-shorenstein-fellows/. As part of the fellowship, she published a paper, “Ethical Scaling: Extreme Speech and the (In)Significance of Artificial Intelligence”, with her research team members.
  • Francqui Foundation in Belgium awarded Sahana Udupa the “Francqui Chair” in recognition of her contribution to critical digital research in 2022.
  • Neena Mahadev’s book manuscript “Of Karma and Grace: Mediating Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka” was the 2021 winner of the Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion. https://www.ircpl.columbia.edu/claremont-winners
  • Article prize: Jiazhi Fengjiang’s article “The ethical labour of suspension among nightclub hostesses in Southeast China” won the 20th William L. Holland Prize for the best article published in 2021 Pacific Affairs. https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/announcements/current-holland-prize-winner/2021-holland-prize/
  • Book Award: Marian Burchardt’s book “Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West” published Rutgers University Press in 2020 won 2021 ISSR (International Society for the Sociology of Religion) Best Book Award. https://www.sisr-issr.org/en/awards-and-grant
  • Book Award: Alan Gamlen’s book “Human Geopolitics: States, Emigrants and the Rise of Diaspora Institutions” published by Oxford University Press in 2019 won the 2020 Distinguished Book Award for Best Book on Ethnicity and Migration from the International Studies Association. https://www.isanet.org/Programs/Awards/ENMISA-Distinguished-Book

Book Publications

2025

  • Dana Schmalz. Forthcoming in January 2025. Das Bevölkerungsargument: Wie die Sorge vor zu vielen Menschen Politik beeinflusst. Suhrkamp.
  • Bob van der Linden. Forthcoming in 2025. Cultivating Sikh Culture and Identity: Art, Music and Philology. Routledge.

2024

  • Martijn van den Brink. 2024. Legislative Authority and Interpretation in the European Union. Oxford University Press.
  • Bob van der Linden. 2024. Romantic Nationalism in India: Cultivation of Culture and the Global Circulation of Ideas. Brill.
  • Seyla Benhabib and Ayelet Shachar. Forthcoming in December 2024. Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration, Asylum, and Shifting Borders. Cambridge University Press. 

2023

2022

  • Ahmad, Irfan & Kang, Jie 2022 (Eds.). The Nation Form in the Global Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Link
  • Chan, Felicity Hwee-Hwa 2022. Tensions in Diversity: Spaces for Collective Life in Los AngelesUniversity of Toronto Press. Link
  • Iturriaga, Nicole 2022  Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past. Columbia University Press. Link
  • Liu, Jifeng. 2022. Negotiating the Christian Past in China: Memory and Missions in Contemporary Xiamen. Penn State University Press. Link
  • Maclochlainn, Scott (Upcoming in November). The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes our Social Worlds. The University of Chicago Press. Link
  • Sampaio, Dora. 2022. Migration, Diversity, and Inequality in Later Life. Ageing at a Crossroads. ‎ Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Scholz, Maximilian Miguel. 2022. Strange Brethren. Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Link
  • Simone, AbdouMaliq 2022. The Surrounds--Urban Life within and beyond Capture. Duke University Press. Link

2021

  • Ahmad, Irfan. 2021 (Ed.). Anthropology and Ethnography are not equivalent. Berghahn. New York. Oxford. Link
  • Lisa Björkman. 2021 (Ed.). Bombay Brokers. Duke University Press. Link
  • Paul Bramadat, Mar Griera, Marian Burchardt, Julia Martinez-Ariño 2021 (Eds). Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces. Bloomsbury. Link
  • Jayeel Cornelio, François Gauthier, Tuomas Martikainen, Linda Woodhead. 2021 (Eds.). Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global SocietyLink
  • Ran Hirschl 2021. City, State. Constitutionalism and the Megacity. Oxford University Press. Link
  • Hudson, Alexander. 2021. The veil of participation: Citizens and political parties in constitution-making processes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Link
  • Jung, Jin-Heon. 2021. Berlin-esŏ mannan Seoul kwa Pyongyang: (T’al)pun-dan tosi-ui yŏlmang iyaki (Seoul and Pyongyang meeting in Berlin: An Essay of (post)Division Cities’ Aspirations). Seoul: Yŏllinch’aktŭl (in Korean)
  • Jung, Jin-Heon. 2021. Ku-sul-saeng-ae-sa-lŭl t'ong-hae pon 5.18ŭi ki-ŏk-kwa yŏk-sa 11: tok-il-p'yŏn (A Memory and History of 5.18 through Life Histories11: Koreans in Germany). kwang-chu: 5.18ki-nyŏm-chae-tan. (in Korean)
  • Jung, Jin-Heon. 2021. (Co-authored) Tok-il han-in-i-chu-yŏ-sŏng-ŭi ch'o-kuk-chŏk salm-kwa chŏng-ch'e-sŏng (German-Korean Women’s Transnational life and Identities). Seoul: Bookkorea. (in Korean)
  • Jung, Jin-Heon. 2021. (Co-authored) T'ong-hap kŭ i-hu-lŭl saeng-kak-ha-ta (Thinking the Aftermath of a unification). Seoul: sa-hoe-p'yŏng-lon-a-k'a-te-mi. (in Korean)
  • Martínez-Ariño,  Julia. 2021. Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York. Link
  • Meyer, Birgitt & van der Veer, Peter. 2021 (Eds.). Refugees and religion: Ethnographic studies of global trajectories. Bloomsbury, London. Link
  • Seethaler-Wari, Shahd.; Chitchian, Somayeh.; Momić, Maja. 2021 (Eds.). Inhabiting displacement: Architecture and authorship. Birkhäuser, Basel. De Gruyter. Link 
  • Türkmen, Gülay. 2021. Under the Banner of Islam: Turks, Kurds, and the Limits of Religious Unity. Oxford University Press. Link
  • Udupa, Sahana; Gagliardone, Iginio; Hervik, Peter. 2021 (Eds.) Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech. Bloomington, Indiana USA:  Indiana University Press. Link
  • Weinbach, Christine. 2021. Systemtheoretische Geschlechtersoziologie: Bestand, Kritik, Perspektiven. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim. Link
  • Yang, Fenggang and White, Chris. 2021 (Eds.). Christian Social Activism and Rule of Law in Chinese Societies. Lehigh University Press. Link

 

Grants

ERC Starting Grant 2024

► Dora Sampaio was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for her project RETIREWEL: Retirement across countries: A tripartite analysis of the welfare state, family care networks, and the retirement industry.

ERC Consolidator Grants 2023

Radhika Gupta was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2023 for a project titled “Entangled Universals of Transnational Islamic Charity” (read more)
Sahana Udupa was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to study small platform discourse (read more)
The new guards: Re-bordering the Southeast Mediterranean in an age of migration

The new guards: Re-bordering the Southeast Mediterranean in an age of migration

Michalis Moutselos
The Max Planck research group, approved to begin in 2022, looks at how Cyprus, Greece and Malta have managed their transformation from countries of emigration to destination countries for migrants and asylum seekers; and their emergence as border states of an emerging EU migration and asylum regime. Scholars from the three countries and migration researchers from Europe will form a network and explore this rebordering of the Southeast Mediterranean in a series of workshops and international conferences.
Re-bordering gradually erodes the sovereignty of nation states and leads to clashes (but also cooperation) among European, national and local institutions. Relatedly, re-bordering is having profound consequences on public understandings of citizenship and nationhood in the three countries. The partner group will be led by MPI alumnus Michalis Moutselos and co-directed by MPI Director Steven Vertovec. It is a formal collaboration between the University of Cyprus and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG). It aims to provide a systematic theoretical and empirical account of re-bordering in this understudied area of the European Union.
 
REVENANT: On the post-imperial legacies and memories of the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Romanovs
Jeremy F. Walton • 11 April 2022
From 2016 to 2022, the Max Planck Research Group “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities” examined the textures, silences, and contradictions that shape the afterlives of empires in central Europe, the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Our research focused on eight cities—Belgrade, Budapest, Istanbul, Sarajevo, Thessaloniki, Trieste, Vienna, and Zagreb—but our explorations were wider in scope and ambition. We reflected on the traces of imperial legacies inscribed on tombstones and memorials. We interrogated the summoning of imperial precedents to whitewashed, majoritarian images of nations and states in the present. We delineated the persistence of imperial social, political and institutional formations in the present, ranging from ideologies of religious and ethnic difference to charitable institutions. We tasted imperial pasts in Viennese-style cafés and cafeterias specializing in “Ottoman” cuisine.
In tandem with the completion of Empires of Memory, a new research group, “REVENANT-Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation,” recently began its activities at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Rijeka, Croatia, with the support of a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (#10100290). Like Empires of Memory, REVENANT was designed by group leader Dr. Jeremy F. Walton. REVENANT is a continuation, an expansion, and a refinement of Empires of Memory. In addition to the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, REVENANT also encompasses the legacies and collective memories of the Romanov Empire. Accordingly, REVENANT entails a more direct focus on post-imperial renderings of inter-imperial dynamics: the ways in which relations between former empires continue to impact the present.
A threefold heuristic informs REVENANT’s methodology: post-imperial persons, post-imperial places, and post-imperial things. Bygone empires as objects of memory achieve personification through former rulers (Emperor Franz Josef; Süleyman the Magnificent; Tsar Peter the Great), imperial consorts (Sissi; Hürrem Sultan; Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna), and rebels (Gavrilo Princip; Atatürk; Lenin). The logics and textures of former empires differ according to place and scale—former imperial centers, erstwhile imperial port cities, and the borderlands of bygone empires each preserve distinct legacies and incubate contrasting memories. Finally, different categories of things constitute imperial pasts—our focus will be on post-imperial relics, post-imperial commodities, and post-imperial memorials. A broader discussion of this post-imperial, inter-imperial methodology can be found in “Post-Empire,”  Dr. Walton’s recent Working Paper for the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
REVENANT will conduct its research over a five-year span. In addition to Dr. Walton, it will employ four post-doctoral and four doctoral fellows. Like Empires of Memory, REVENANT is adamantly interdisciplinary, and will incorporate insights from Anthropology, Art and Architectural History, Comparative Literature, History, Memory Studies, Political Science, Sociology, and Urban Studies. Our geographic remit includes no less than nine post-imperial nation-states, including Austria, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Greece, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. Please visit us in Rijeka if and when you are able. more
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