Senior Fellows at the College

Susanne Fengler is Professor of International Journalism at TU Dortmund University and Scientific Director of the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism. Her research focuses on comparative journalism studies, media accountability, media development cooperation, migration and journalism, and the economics of journalism.

She has coordinated and led numerous international research projects funded by the European Union, Horizon 2020, the Volkswagen Foundation, UNESCO, the German Federal Foreign Office, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and other organisations. Her current work includes projects on journalism education, media accountability, migration, disinformation and democratic resilience, with a particular focus on Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Susanne Fengler is the Scientific Director of the European Journalism Observatory (EJO) and has published extensively on media accountability, journalism ethics and comparative media systems. She has edited several influential books, including the Global Handbook of Media Accountability and the European Handbook of Media Accountability. Her research has received international recognition, including the MERCUR Science Award and the Günter Wallraff Prize for Journalism Criticism.

Alongside her academic work, she actively contributes to international scholarly networks, editorial boards and advisory committees, fostering collaboration between journalism research, education and professional practice worldwide.
 

Website

https://en.journalistik-dortmund.de/about-us/staff/professors/prof-dr-susanne-fengler

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, where he teaches and researches with a focus on collective violence, its conditions, its events and its consequences.

Website

https://www.sowi.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/lehre/sopsan/gudehus.html.en

Jens Martin Gurr has been Full Professor of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2007. Fields of research include British, American and Anglophone literature and culture from the 17^th to the 21^st century, urban literary and cultural studies, theories and practices of modelling, the literary history of ideas, research on conflicts, conflict regulation and democratic education in plural societies, Enlightenment research, public functions of narrative, memory studies, and research on the role and functions of literature and of literary studies. 

Jens Gurr is the author or co-author of seven monographs, most recently Understanding Public Debates: What Literary Studies Can Do (Routledge 2024) and Enlightenment Controversies: Literary Self-Critique and Present-Day Debates (forthcoming with de Gruyter in August 2026). He is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled Literary Studies in the Age of AI, Populism and Anti-Academic Resentment and is heading an interdisciplinary project on ‘Cultures of Compromise’. Jens Gurr is a member of the board of trustees (Kuratorium) of the Volkswagen Foundation and of the university council (Hochschulrat) of the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Website

https://www.uni-due.de/balc/gurr_jens

Christof Hartmann is Professor of International Relations and African Politics at the Institute of Political Science, of the University of Duisburg-Essen and Director of the Institute for Development and Peace (INEF). He is also corresponding member of the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy at Ruhr-University Bochum, where he worked before joining the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2006. He was also a Senior Guest Lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa (2002–2006) and a Senior Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advances Studies in Africa in Accra, Ghana (2023). 

His research interests focus on processes of institutional change in African countries, regional cooperation in Africa with a focus on West Africa, Africa’s development and Africa’s relations with external actors. He has published extensively on governance, development, democracy, authoritarianism and regionalism in Africa. His recent books include China’s New Role in African Politics: From Non-Intervention towards Stabilization (Routledge 2020) and African Non-Military Conflict Intervention Practices (Routledge 2026).

Website

http://www.uni-due.de/politik/hartmann_en.php

Jakob Kapeller is a philosopher who has accidentally become an economist. He serves as a professor at the Institute for Socio-Economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen and heads the Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy (ICAE) at Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria). His research interests focus on socio-economic change from a political economy perspective, the history of economic and political ideas, the philosophy of the social sciences, distributional issues and heterodox economics. 

Jakob Kapeller has published widely in different disciplinary contexts. His work has been featured in journals such as Research Policy, Socio-Economic Review, Review of International Political Economy and Cambridge Journal of Economics. He received several academic awards, including the William Kapp Prize (awarded by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, EAEPE), the Egon Matzner Prize (awarded by the Technical University Vienna) and the Kurt Rothschild Prize (awarded by the Austrian Parliament). He also acts as a reviewer for a series of internationally recognised journals and has been the editor of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter (www.heterodoxnews.com) since 2013. Some of his third-party-funded work – e.g., his papers on the distribution of wealth in Austria or his analysis of the role of economic models in European fiscal governance – has been extensively covered by national and international media.

Website

https://jakob-kapeller.org/

Alexandra König is Professor of Socialisation Research at the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the University of Duisburg-Essen. She examines socialisation processes in different phases of life (especially childhood and adolescence), in different socialisation settings (family, school, the workplace, university, peers) and on the basis of diverse research objects (taste, education, professional fields) and relations (especially relations to animals). Central to her research is an interactionist and inequality-analytical perspective.

Currently she is studying the question how ‘good parenting’ or ‘good childhood’ are defined from different perspectives. She approaches this question primarily in two projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), using examples of different phenomena: the EliA project on parenthood in the adoption process – is investigating how ‘good parents’ are sought for a child given up for adoption in the adoption process. In the TraNa project on self-positioning in transnational spaces that focuses on children's narrations and narrations about children living in transnational families, she is looking at how children in Poland whose parents work (temporarily) abroad experience their transnational family life and how they position themselves in the transnational space. 

Website

https://www.uni-due.de/biwi/koenig/start.php

Andreas Niederberger is Professor of Political, Legal and Social Philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He was a visiting professor at Saint Louis University and Northwestern University (both USA), the University of Osaka (Japan), and LUISS in Rome (Italy). His research focuses on the foundations of democracy and law, as well as questions of human rights, global justice and legitimacy, particularly in relation to war, migration, climate change and property regimes. He has led, and continues to lead, numerous research projects, including the EU Horizon 2020 research project ‘Norms and Values in the European Migration and Refugee Crisis’ (NoVaMigra), which examined whether and how the recent influx of refugees to Europe had affected European values and, more broadly, democratic institutions and procedures. Since 2021, he has been Deputy Chair of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg. Recent publications are Philosophie der Menschenrechte (Bielefeld: utb 2025), Handbook of Migration Ethics (ed. with U. Okeja and J. Gördemann, Cham: Springer 2025), and Cosmopolitan Norms and European Values. Ethical Perspectives on Europe’s Refugee Policy (ed. with M. Göbel, New York, London: Routledge 2024).

Website

https://www.uni-due.de/philosophie/politischephilosophie/niederberger

Jessica Schwittek is a postdoctoral researcher in childhood, youth and family studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen whose work explores how children and young people experience growing up in contexts of migration, transnational family life, and social inequality. Her research combines qualitative and participatory methodologies to foreground young people’s own perspectives on belonging, family relationships, identity, and everyday social worlds.

Her current research focuses on children living in transnational families, examining how they position themselves across national borders and negotiate family, care, and social belonging. As Co-Principal Investigator of the German-Polish research cooperation ‘Self-Positioning in Transnational Spaces’ (TraNa), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the National Science Centre Poland (NCN), she investigates children's narratives and the social processes shaping transnational childhoods.

Beyond transnational childhoods, her work addresses refugee childhoods, migration, friendship, intergenerational relations, and childhood research across Europe and Asia. Through interdisciplinary and international collaborations, she contributes to advancing child-centred research methodologies and to a deeper understanding of how global mobility and social change transform families’ and children's lives and educational experiences.

Website

https://www.uni-due.de/biwi/koenig/schwittek_en.php

Karen Shire, PhD, is Professor of Comparative Sociology and Japanese Society at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE). She is co-speaker of the DFG Research Training Group Cross-Border Labour Markets, a member of the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy, a member of the selection committee of the Humboldt Foundation’s Feodor Lynen Fellowship Program and President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee 02 Economy and Society. Her current research is on the economic sociology of migrant labour markets, and the macro-structural determinants of labour exploitation in the global economy. Her publications include ‘The Political and Social Economy of Labour Migration’ (2026, ed., with Heidi Gottfried and Rina Agarwala, Global Dialogues), Trafficking Chains: Modern Slavery in Society (2024, with Sylvia Walby, Bristol University Press), ‘The Future of Gender Regimes’ (2023, ed. with H. Gottfried and S. Walby, Women’s Studies International Forum), The dynamics of welfare markets: Private pensions and domestic/care services in Europe (2021, ed. with C. Ledoux and F. van Hooren, Palgrave Macmillan) and ‘The Social Order of Transnational Migration Markets’ (Global Networks, 2020).

Website

https://www.uni-due.de/soziologie/shire.php

Estrid Sørensen is a professor of anthropology of knowledge at Ruhr University Bochum. She has conducted research within a wide field of science and technology studies, including educational technologies, media harm discourses, cyber security, and digital methods. Most recently she has turned towards researching computing infrastructures. Her ethnographic and historical research addresses both scientific and corporate data centres as well as high-performance computing, and inquires the co-enactment of knowledge production and planetarity. She has recently coined the notion of ‘planetary scientific knowledge’ to conceptualise science as not only social and material, but as ontologically planetary. 

Recent publications: 

Sørensen, Estrid (2026): ‘Servers’, in: Hogan, M. / Stefan, L. / Ongweso, E. (eds.): Predictions: From Speculative Ethnography to Apocalyptic Testimony. Lancaster: Mattering Press, pp. 120–126. 

Çelik, Leman / Laser, Stefan / Sørensen, Estrid / Abels, Sandra (2026): Staying with the Planet: The University That Tried to Reckon with Ecological Reality, Challenged Excessive Data Infrastructures, and Nurtured a Few Alternatives Not Planned For. Bielefeld: transcript. 

Sørensen, Estrid (2026): ‘Die Als-ob, die Langsame und die Planetare Universität: Drei Modi möglicher Universitäten‘, In: Breil, P. / Sprenger, F. (eds.): Virtuelle Universität – Geistes- und gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Zugänge. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 493–500. 

Sørensen, Estrid (2025): ‘Erzählungen durch Daten: distanzierte, engagierte, responsable, kollektive und planetare‘, In: Holfelder, U. / Peball, P. W. / Schemmer, J. / Schönberger, K. (eds.): Alltage und Kultur/en der Digitalität. Wien: Selbstverlag des Vereins für Volkskunde, pp. 33–52.

Website

https://www.sowi.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/cupak/team/sorensen.html.en

Sören Urbansky is Professor of Eastern European History at Ruhr University Bochum. He specialises in Sino-Russian relations, with research interests in migration, infrastructure, racism, and border history. Previously, he headed the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington, based at the University of California, Berkeley (USA). He has also held research and teaching positions at the universities of Freiburg, Cambridge, and Munich, and has been a visiting scholar at Academia Sinica in Taipei (Taiwan) and Hokkaido University in Sapporo (Japan). 

Sören Urbansky is the author of four monographs, including Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton University Press 2020) and Entangled Empires: Four Centuries of China–Russia Relations (with Martin Wagner, Polity 2026).

Website

https://www.oeg.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/oeg/personen/urbansky.html.en

Thorsten Wiechmann is Professor of Spatial Planning and Planning Theory at the School of Spatial Planning at TU Dortmund University, where he served as Dean from 2018 to 2022. Previously, he held the Chair of Spatial Planning at TU Dresden and was Director of the Institute of Geography. His research focuses on strategic spatial planning, metropolitan governance, and the transformation of cities and regions under conditions such as demographic change and structural uncertainty. A particular interest lies in the role of future visions, scenarios, and strategic foresight in planning processes. Recently, he has also worked extensively on the application of artificial intelligence in spatial planning. He has led numerous national and international research and practice projects and has published more than 100 academic works.

Website

https://rop.raumplanung.tu-dortmund.de/en/working-group/team/prof-dr-habil-thorsten-wiechmann