The College welcomes up to 20 distinguished international scholars from universities and research institutions around the globe as Senior Fellows each year. During their six-month residencies at the College, commencing in spring or autumn, they collaborate with UA Ruhr researchers who are also considered members of the College for the time of the fellowship.
This section introduces the College’s current Senior Fellows and their tandem partners from the UA Ruhr, presenting their research profiles and joint projects.
Qingxiu Bu is Reader in Global Law at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex, UK. He has published widely in a variety of areas of law, many of which are themed around law and global challenges, with a particular focus on the development of legal infrastructures in transnational law and global governance. He has previously been a lecturer in law at Cardiff Law School of Cardiff University and the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast (UK), during which he taught transnational business law at the Centre of Transnational Legal Studies (CTLS), Georgetown University (USA) as Adjunct Professor. Qingxiu Bu was appointed as Li Kashing Professor of Practice at the Faculty of Law, McGill University (Canada) in 2019. He has held visiting posts at various institutions, including Lund University (Sweden), Tel Aviv University (Israel) and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Germany.
Prof. Daniel Feierstein
National University of Tres de Febrero (Argentina) | Sociology
Daniel Feierstein holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), where he runs the Observatory of State Crimes. He is also Director of the Center of Genocide Studies at the National University of Tres de Febrero and Senior Researcher at the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). His work primarily focuses on genocidal social practices and has been crucial in the increased recognition of Argentina’s military junta’s crimes as genocide. He was a member of the National Committee of Ethics in Science and Technology (CECTE) at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Argentina from 2022 to 2024.
Daniel Feierstein was President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) from 2013 to 2015. He has also acted as a judge and chair in different sessions of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) in the cases of Sri Lanka (2010 and 2013), Mexico (2014), Myanmar (2017), Colombia (2021) and West Papua (2024). He was adviser of different bodies in the United Nations and he appeared as an expert witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2021.
Feierstein has published 12 authored books in Spanish and many antologies. His authored books in English are Genocide as a Social Practice. Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas (2014), Social and Political Representations of the COVID-19 Crisis (2022) and Memories and Representations of Terror. Working through Genocide (2024).
Prof. Christian Gudehus
Ruhr University Bochum | Social Science, Social and Cultural Psychology
E-mail: christian.gudehus@rub.de
Prof. Sean Franzel
University of Missouri (USA) | German Studies, Periodical Studies, Media History
E-mail: sean.franzel@college-uaruhr.de
Sean Franzel is Professor of German at the University of Missouri (USA) and holds the William H. Byler Distinguished Chair in the Humanities. His research focuses on the literary, intellectual and media history of the 18th and 19th centuries. His current research involves work on periodical literature and editorial philology, and on German-American journalists and transatlantic publishing networks. He recently published an interdisciplinary study of the Romantic and Idealist lecture that intervenes in media history, the history of scholarly culture, theories of publicity, and Romantic legacies in aesthetic and political discourse. His monograph Writing Time: Studies in Serial Literature, 1780-1850 (2023) is a study of temporality and seriality in the nineteenth-century periodical. It was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures.
Recent editorial projects include a co-edited anthology of major programmatic texts of cultural journalism from the first half of the 19th century (Cultural Journalism in Germany, 1815–1848: A Critical Anthology, 2025); a co-edited volume on the inventory as cultural technique and media practice (Taking Stock: Media Inventories in the German Nineteenth Century, 2024); and a co-edited and co-translated collection of essays by Reinhart Koselleck (2018).
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Prof. Ingo Heidbrink
Old Dominion University (USA) | Maritime and Economic History
E-mail: ingo.heidbrink@college-uaruhr.de
Ingo Heidbrink is a maritime historian and Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk (USA). He studied at the universities of Hamburg and Bremen and has worked with various maritime museums in Germany from the mid-1990s until 2007. During this time, he taught at the University of Bremen and was co-founder of the Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences – GLOMAR. In 2007 he accepted a professorship in maritime history at Old Dominion University.
Ingo Heidbrink is a specialist for inland waterway history, fisheries and whaling history, and polar history. He taught two terms at Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland, and was research fellow and visiting professor at institutions all around the globe, including the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg - Institute for Advanced Study (Germany), the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the LMU Munich (Germany), the Maritime Studies Centre at the University of Hull (UK), and the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg (Russia).
He has authored or edited more than 12 books and published approximately 100 scholarly articles. He is President of the International Maritime History Association (IMHA) and Secretary of the International Polar Heritage Committee (IPHC). His last major research project was funded by the Norwegian Research Council and dealt with the topic of natural ice as an agent of modernisation.
Prof. Frank Uekötter
Ruhr University Bochum | History of Technology and Environmental History
E-mail: frank.uekoetter@rub.de
Dr Lorraine Ryan
University of Birmingham (UK) | Hispanic Studies
E-mail: lorraine.ryan@college-uaruhr.de
Lorraine Ryan is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). She is an award-winning international researcher in the fields of Spanish literature, memory studies, and gender. She has published two monographs, Memory and Spatiality in Post-Millennial Spanish Narrative and Gender and Memory in the Novels of Almudena Grandes, and various articles on collective and cultural memory in Spain, Spanish women´s writing, and masculinity in journals such as the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, MLN and Romance Quarterly. She has served as Director of Postgraduate Research for the Department of Modern Languages.
Lorraine Ryan has won the USA´s most prestigious prizes in Modern Languages: In 2013, she was awarded the prestigious AATSP's (American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese) Outstanding Scholarly Publication Award, and in 2019, she was awarded second prize in the Annual Adela Zamudio Competition for best published article, organised by the organisation Feministas Unidas. On both occasions, she was the first academic outside of the USA to receive this honour.
Prof. Susanne Zepp-Zwirner
University of Duisburg Essen | Spanish and Latin-American Literatures
E-mail: susanne.zeppzwirner@uni-due.de
Prof. Tülin Şener
Ankara University (Turkey) | Educational and Developmental Psychology
E-mail: tulin.sener@college-uaruhr.de
Tülin Şener is Full Professor of Educational Psychology at Ankara University, Turkey. As an expert in developmental psychology, her research spans child and adolescent development, identity, well-being, parenting, children’s and youth participation and civic engagement with a strong focus on culturally contextualised perspectives. With extensive international experience, she has held prestigious positions as a visiting scholar at The City University of New York and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Berlin Intercultural Research Center for Child, Youth, and Adult Studies, Germany.
Tülin Şener has played a pivotal role as a national and international consultant, particularly for the Council of Europe, where she contributes actively to education policy and democratic participation projects aimed at strengthening youth civic engagement, child rights, and democratic and inclusive education across Europe and Turkey. Additionally, she serves as a consultant for United Nations initiatives focused on youth rights, sexual and reproductive health education, and humanitarian support programmes for young refugees.
Her scholarly contributions include numerous authored and edited academic books, peer-reviewed articles, and significant translations. She also holds advisory roles in key child rights, democratic education, and youth participation initiatives, reflecting her commitment to bridging academic research with impactful policy and practice.
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Prof. Philipp Jugert
University of Duisburg Essen | Intercultural Psychology
E-mail: philipp.jugert@uni-due.de
Dr Rashed Uz Zaman
University of Dhaka (Bangladesh) | International Relations
Rashed Uz Zaman has been a lecturer and researcher at the Department of International Relations of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, since 1998. He holds a PhD in strategic studies from the University of Reading, UK. He was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Erfurt, Germany (2009–2011) and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, USA, in 2012.
Rashed Uz Zaman works on strategic and international security issues and, in recent years, on civil-military relations in Bangladesh. Latest publications include an article titled ‘Defence Diplomacy and Civil-Military Relations in Bangladesh’ in the Journal of Political & Military Sociology (2024) and a chapter on ‘Defence Diplomacy and Civil-Military Relations: The Case of Bangladesh’ in the volume Asian Military Evolutions: Civil Military Relations in Asia (2023).
Rashed Uz Zaman speaks regularly at various international and national educational, defence and administrative institutions including the Defence Services Command & Staff College (DSCSC), the National Defence College (NDC), Bangladesh, the Tribhuvan University, Nepal, the National Defence College, Sri Lanka, the Foreign Service Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bangladesh, and the Public Administration Training Center (BPATC) and Police Staff College, Bangladesh.
Prof. Dennis Dijkzeul
Ruhr University Bochum, Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV) | Conflict and Organisation Research
E-mail: dennis.dijkzeul@rub.de
Prof. Nelson Casimiro Zavale
Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique) | Education, Higher Education and Science Studies
E-mail: nelson.zavale@college-uaruhr.de
Nelson Casimiro Zavale is currently Associate Professor at Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) in Maputo, Mozambique, and an affiliate of the African Academy of Sciences. Previously, he was a senior research fellow at RWTH Aachen University, Germany (2022–2024), a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, USA (2021–2022), a Humboldt Research Fellow at the International Center for Higher Education Research INCHER, University of Kassel, Germany (2018–2021) and a Swiss Government Excellence postdoctoral fellow (2015–2016) at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He has also held different management positions at UEM, among others as Deputy Dean for Research and Extension.
Nelson Casimiro Zavale’s research focuses on questioning existing assumptions in Africa (and the Global South) about the contribution of higher education, science, technology and innovation to socio-economic development. His work appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including Higher Education, Scientometrics, Science and Public Policy, International Journal of Educational Development, and Quality in Higher Education. His latest book University Societal Engagement in African Contexts: Benefits, Drivers and Constraints was published by Routledge in 2025.
Prof. Uwe Wilkesmann
TU Dortmund University, Centre for Higher Education (zhb) | Organisation Studies and Management of Continuing Education
E-mail: uwe.wilkesmann@tu-dortmund.de
An overview of all former Senior Fellows hosted by the College is available here:
Prof. Dennis Dijkzeul
Ruhr University Bochum, Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV) | Conflict and Organisation Research
E-mail: dennis.dijkzeul@rub.de
Dennis Dijkzeul is professor of conflict and organiation research at the School of Social Sciences and the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict at Ruhr University Bochum. He was the founding director of the Humanitarian Affairs Program at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University in New York. He has conducted research projects on international and local organisations in the DRC, Uganda, South Sudan, and Afghanistan, and has worked as a consultant for UN organisations and NGOs in Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and Latin America. His main research interests concern humanitarian crises, the management of international organisations (UN, NGOs, and diaspora organisations) and their interaction with local actors.
Website
Thomas Feldhoff is Professor of Human Geography at the Faculty of Geography and Geosciences, Ruhr University Bochum. After graduating from East Asian Studies with a regional focus on Japan, he received his PhD in Geography at the University of Duisburg in 1999. He habilitated at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2004 with a thesis on the institutional foundations of construction lobbyism in Japan. He received the 2006 JaDe Award of the Association for the Promotion of Japanese German Cultural Relations (JaDe) and a Book Prize of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS) in 2008 for his publication Bau-Lobbyismus in Japan.
Before joining Ruhr University Bochum in April 2016, Thomas Feldhoff held senior faculty positions at universities in Germany, the UK and Japan. His research and teaching today focuses on the nexus of georesources, sustainability and geopolitics with regard to sociotechnical transitions. It is based on a relational, multi-scalar, comparative perspective that looks into the ties to wider politics of territoriality, state, economy, science, and nature.
Thomas Feldhoff is Coordinator and Co-Director of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Redesigning the Post-Industrial City (EMJM RePIC), an inter-university, multidisciplinary study programme run by eight partners of the European University Alliance UNIC – The European University of Cities in Post-Industrial Transition.
Prof. Christian Gudehus
Ruhr University Bochum | Social Science, Social and Cultural Psychology
E-mail: christian.gudehus@rub.de
Christian Gudehus is a social scientist with a particular interest in social and cultural psychology. Together with Pradeep Chakkarath, he has been publishing the journal HARM as an open-access publication since January 2022. He also founded the journal Trauma Kultur Gesellschaft (trauma culture society) together with colleagues from the clinical field and the social sciences and humanities. He is also a permanent fellow at the Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Centre (KKC) for Social and Cultural Psychology and Historical Anthropology located at Ruhr University Bochum. Christian Gudehus is currently leading a project funded by the German government that is looking into the mass violence perpetrated by the Turkish military in the Dersim region in 1937/38. At Ruhr University Bochum, he teaches and researches with a focus on collective violence, its conditions, its events and its consequences.
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Prof. Philipp Jugert
University of Duisburg Essen | Intercultural Psychology
E-mail: philipp.jugert@uni-due.de
Philipp Jugert is Professor of Intercultural Psychology – Migration and Integration at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Previously, he was a research associate at the University of Leipzig (2011-2018). Jugert completed his PhD at the International Graduate College ‘Conflict and Cooperation between Social Groups’ (IGC) at the University of Jena.
His work focuses on social-developmental psychology, intergroup relations, identity development, and civic engagement of young people. In particular, he explores how children and adolescents navigate cultural diversity in a variety of settings and how social contexts shape and are shaped by their attitudes and behaviours. He has co-led several national and international collaborative projects on youth integration and political socialisation. His current work investigates civic engagement of immigrant parents in formal and non-formal institutional settings.
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Nicola Kaminski is Professor of German at Ruhr University Bochum. Her research interests focus on the semantic potential of material manifestations of literature from the early days of book printing to the second half of the 19th century. Since 2010, she has developed a material-philological research approach in several books together with Volker Mergenthaler (University of Marburg) and as spokesperson for the research group ‘Journalliteratur: Formatbedingungen, visuelles Design, Rezeptionskulturen’ (Bochum, Marburg, Cologne, 2016–2022) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which combines close reading in literary studies with the methodology of print analysis in book studies. The work in this research network, from which book publications such as Optische Auftritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur (2019), Zeit/Schrift 1813-1815 oder Chronopoetik des ‘Unregelmäßigen’ (2022), Die journalliterarische Leseszene im Spiegel des Modebilds. Modellversuch zur ‘Wiener Zeitschrift’ 1816-1849 (2022) oder Vor Reclams Universal-Bibliothek. Mediale Genealogien der ‘Classiker’-Reihen ab 1810 (2025; in print) emerged, was and is in close contact with international journal literature research, especially the Anglo-Saxon branch oriented towards book studies.
Prof. Frank Uekötter
Ruhr University Bochum | History of Technology and Environmental History
E-mail: frank.uekoetter@rub.de
Frank Uekötter studied history, political science and social sciences at the universities of Freiburg and Bielefeld (Germany) and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (USA). He received his PhD from Bielefeld University in 2001, where he continued to work for several years before moving to Munich in 2006. He taught at LMU Munich and was among the founders of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, an Institute for Advanced Studies in the environmental humanities jointly run by LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum. This helped him to move beyond his primary focus on German and US history towards more global perspectives on the past.
Frank Uekötter left Germany in 2013 and joined the history department at the University of Birmingham (UK), where he worked on an environmental history of the modern world that was finally published as The Vortex. An Environmental History of the Modern World in 2023. During his time in Britain, he received fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University. He received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for the project ‘The Making of Monoculture: A Global History’ (MaMoGH) in 2021. He joined Ruhr University Bochum in June 2023. A major strand of his work revolves around questions on how infrastructure projects construct modern societies.
Prof. Uwe Wilkesmann
TU Dortmund University, Centre for Higher Education (zhb) | Organisation Studies and Management of Continuing Education
E-mail: uwe.wilkesmann@tu-dortmund.de
Uwe Wilkesmann is Director of the Centre for Higher Education (zhb) at TU Dortmund University and professor for Organisation Studies and Management of Continuing Education. He teaches as a co-opted professor at the Department of Social Sciences. His research focusses on higher education, knowledge-intensive organisations, and organisational sociology.
Research profile (TU Dortmund University): https://ow.zhb.tu-dortmund.de/en/research/profile.
Website
https://ow.zhb.tu-dortmund.de/en/professorship/team/prof-dr-uwe-wilkesmann
Prof. Susanne Zepp-Zwirner
University of Duisburg Essen | Spanish and Latin-American Literatures
E-mail: susanne.zeppzwirner@uni-due.de
Susanne Zepp-Zwirner studied Spanish, Portuguese, and French Philology (Continental and Latin American), Comparative Literature, and Modern German Literary History at the University of Wuppertal, where she became a research associate at the Institute of Romance Studies in 1997. She received her PhD in Romance Philology from Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) in 2002. From 2003 to 2015, she served as Deputy Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig. From 2011 to 2023, she was Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and French Philology at FUB, and in 2022 and 2023, she served as spokesperson for the board of the Selma Stern Centre for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. Since summer semester 2023, she has been Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In 2023, she was awarded the Order of Isabella the Catholic of Spain.
Her research focuses on Spanish, Latin American, Portuguese, and French literatures, literary and cultural theory, Jewish literatures, and law and literature. She is co-editor of the journal Romanistisches Jahrbuch and chaired the German Hispanists’ Association from 2019 to 2023. She has held visiting positions at Tel Aviv University (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), EHESS Paris (France), and the Fundación Duques de Soria (Spain). In summer 2025, she was Harris Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College (USA). She is a Henriette Herz Scout and serves on the election committee for research awards of the Humboldt Foundation.
University of Sussex (UK) | Global Law
Ruhr University Bochum | Human Geography
National University of Tres de Febrero (Argentina) | Sociology
Ruhr University Bochum | Social Science, Social and Cultural Psychology
University of Missouri (USA) | German Studies, Periodical Studies, Media History
Ruhr University Bochum | German Studies
Old Dominion University (USA) | Maritime and Economic History
Ruhr University Bochum | History of Technology and Environmental History
University of Birmingham (UK) | Hispanic Studies
University of Duisburg Essen | Spanish and Latin-American Literatures
Ankara University (Turkey) | Educational and Developmental Psychology
University of Duisburg Essen | Intercultural Psychology
University of Dhaka (Bangladesh) | International Relations
Ruhr University Bochum, Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV) | Conflict and Organisation Research
Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique) | Education, Higher Education and Science Studies
TU Dortmund University, Centre for Higher Education (zhb) | Organisation Studies and Management of Continuing Education