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.
Prof. Sreeparna Chattopadhyay
Manipal Academy of Higher Education (India) | Cultural Anthropology
Sreeparna Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor at the Manipal Law School (India). She holds a Master’s degree and a PhD in Anthropology from Brown University (USA), and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai (India). Her research, teaching, and advocacy in the last 18 years can be broadly divided into three interlinked themes: 1) Gendered violence such as domestic and sexual violence in India; 2) Intersectional inequities, including those emanating from health systems that tend to disproportionately affect religious minorities and indigenous populations; 3) Analyses of reproduction using a political ecology and a biocultural approach that disentangles the contributions of global health initiatives, local-level technocratic interventions, and the social determinants of health.
Sreeparna Chattopadhyay has received several prestigious awards, including from the US National Science Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Population Reference Bureau (USA) to support her work. She has published in multiple international peer-reviewed journals. Her book The Gravity of Hope, which examines the interlinkages between domestic and structural violence, was published in 2024.
Her research has been covered by the US press and international media. She has worked for the government, academia, and non-profit organisations in India, the USA and the UK. She is deeply invested in translational research, and she writes extensively for independent digital platforms and the popular press.
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© UDE / Fabian Strauch
Prof. Elena Beregow
College for Social Sciences and Humanities & TU Dortmund University & University of Duisburg-Essen | Cultural Sociology
Phone: +49 201 183 65 66
E-mail: elena.beregow@college-uaruhr.de
Prof. Daniel Chigudu
University of South Africa (South Africa) | Political Science and Governance
E-mail: daniel.chigudu@college-uaruhr.de
Daniel Chigudu is a political scientist, development practitioner, governance specialist, and Professor of Political Science and Governance at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He holds a PhD in Peace and Conflict Management Studies and has over three decades of professional experience spanning academia, international development, civil society leadership, and policy consulting.
Daniel Chigudu is a specialist in governance, peace and conflict studies, social protection, gender equality, and development evaluation, with a particular focus on African contexts. His scholarly interests centre on how governance systems and social protection policies can address systemic vulnerabilities and promote inclusive, resilient societies. He studied at the University of Zimbabwe and has worked with leading international organisations, including the African Union, UNESCO, Oxfam, and the United Nations Development Programme, across Africa and globally since the early 2000s.
He has authored and edited numerous publications and published over 70 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals. His recent research addresses critical development challenges, including peace and security, climate change, migration, gender-based peacebuilding, and human security in Africa. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the African Journal of Development Studies and has held visiting professorships and research fellowships at academic institutions across Africa and internationally.
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© Aliona Kardash
Prof. Martina Brandt
TU Dortmund University | Social Structure and Sociology of Ageing Societies
E-mail: martina.brandt@tu-dortmund.de
Prof. Alison Evans Cuellar
George Mason University (USA) | Health Administration and Policy
E-mail: alison.evanscuellar@uni-due.de
Alison Cuellar is Professor of Health Administration and Policy at the College of Public Health at George Mason University (USA). She studies children’s health policy, including services and health insurance for low-income children. Her research includes children who experience poor mental health or who are involved in child welfare or justice systems. She is currently engaged in research related to health care for children in community clinics and related to insurance payment. In other work she has examined the intersection of behavioural health and the justice system; Medicaid policies and their impact on justice-involved youth and youth with behavioural health problems; mental health courts as an innovative alternative for justice-involved juveniles; and health care services for incarcerated youth and adults returning to the community. Her research has been funded by federal and philanthropic grants.
Alison Cuellar recently served on the The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's committee ‘Improving the Health and Wellbeing of Children and Youth through Health Care System Transformation’. In addition, she serves as Chair of the Community Preventive Services Task Force (CPSTF) to which she was appointed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CPSTF is an independent, non-federal panel of public health and prevention experts that provides recommendations and findings on programmes, services, and other interventions to protect and improve population health.
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Photo Karlsson: © Anders Wahlund
Prof. Martin Karlsson & Prof. Daniel Kühnle
University of Duisburg-Essen | Economics, Health Economics
Prof. Aschalew Abeje Lakew
Bahir Dar University (Ethiopia) | Social Anthropology, Migration Studies
E-mail: aschalew.lakew@college-uaruhr.de
Aschalew Abeje Lakew is Associate Professor of Migration Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Bahir Dar University (Ethiopia). He has published influential works in his area of specialisation, with a particular emphasis on the underlying mechanisms of internal and transnational migration, as well as the challenges and opportunities related to these phenomena on the social structure in Ethiopia, especially the Amhara Region. Since 2002 he has been engaged in various positions as a graduate assistant, lecturer, and assistant professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Bahir Dar University. In this capacity, he has been involved in research projects and community engagement initiatives, for instance on combating child migration and human trafficking in Ethiopia, and he has taught several courses on theories of anthropology, qualitative / ethnographic research methods, transnationalism and migration studies. In an administrative role, he has served as Vice-Dean for Research and Community Services of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Bahir Dar University.
Prof. Julia Ng
Goldsmiths, University of London (UK) | History of Philosophy, German and Comparative Literature
E-mail: julia.ng@college-uaruhr.de
Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and Founding Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). Her work has explored the links between modern mathematics and political thought, modern German-Jewish philosophy, and theories of history and language in the 20th century, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin.
Julia Ng's investigation of the history of Critical Theory is based principally on archival research: as seen, for instance, in her co-edition of Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Marburg School: Special Issue of the Modern Language Notes 127.3 (2012), and (with Peter Fenves) of Walter Benjamin's Toward the Critique of Violence and associated fragments (2021), which also contains her new translation and critical annotations on Benjamin's essay. She is also the co-editor of Werner Hamacher's writings on Friedrich Hölderlin (2020) and contributes more broadly to literary and Critical Theory with work on Derrida, Agamben, Kant, Descartes, Shakespeare, Sappho, Sterne, Kraus, Baudelaire, and figures of reversibility, undecidability, singularity, and the philosophical archive.
Julia Ng is currently completing a book on Daoism and capitalism based around Benjamin’s and Weber’s respective images of China ancient and modern, which has received support from a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, the Leverhulme Trust, the Center for Jewish History (New York City, USA), and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.
Website
https://www.gold.ac.uk/music-english-theatre/people/ng-julia/
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© Damian Gorczany
Prof. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Ruhr-University Bochum | Media Studies / Gender Studies
E-mail: astrid.deuber-mankowsky@rub.de
Prof. Anna Ohanjanyan
Mesrop Mashtots Research Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Armenia) | Historical Theology, Religious Studies
Anna Ohanjanyan holds a PhD in Historical Theology and Religious Studies. She is Head of the Department for the Study of the Armenian Texts of the 15th–19th Centuries at the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts ‘Matenadaran’ (Armenia), Associate Professor at Yerevan State University, and senior researcher at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute.
Anna Ohanjanyan conducted postdoctoral research at the Central European University in Budapest within the ERC project ‘OTTOCONFESSION’ and at the New Europe College (Institute for Advanced Study) in Bucharest. She is the author of the monographs The Book ‘Key of Truth’ and Its Historiographical Significance (YSU Press 2015), and Tōnapatchar (The Causes of Feast Days): Introduction and Text, Part I (Holy Etchmiadzin Press 2016). She is currently preparing her new book entitled Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy in the Armenian Polemical Literature from Ottoman and Safavid Context (17th–18th centuries).
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© Konstantinos Evangelidis
Prof. Margarita Voulgaropoulou
Ruhr University Bochum | Art History, Mediterranean Studies
Prof. Oludayo Tade
University of Ibadan (Nigeria) | Sociology, Criminology
E-mail: oludayo.tade@college-uaruhr.de
Oludayo Tade is a sociologist (criminology, victimology and security studies) currently teaching at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria). He is the founding president of the Nigeria Society for Criminology (NSC), Head of Communications at the Conflict Research Network West Africa (CORN) and affiliated with the African Diaspora Resource and Research Center. A former fellow at the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California Irvine (USA) and at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), Oludayo Tade’s research covers victims of crime, cybercriminality, deviance and social problems, conflict and peace studies, protests, diaspora and transnational studies.
He has received research grants from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, Nigeria (TETFund), the Gates Foundation (USA), and the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan (USA), among others. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology (IJOTCC) and of the Nigerian Journal of Criminology and Security Studies.
Prof. Christine Morgenstern
Ruhr University Bochum | Law, Criminology
E-mail: christine.morgenstern@rub.de
Prof. Kathryn Temple
Georgetown University (USA) | Law, Literary Studies
E-mail: kathryn.temple@college-uaruhr.de
Kathryn D. Temple is Professor of Law & Humanities at Georgetown University (USA) and a three-term former chair of the English Department. Her most recent book Loving Justice (NYU Press 2019) focused on legal emotions in 18th-century England while her current project, entitled Ambivalence: Law, Culture, and the Invention of a Modern Emotion, is under contract at NYU Press. She has published widely on the history of legal emotions with essays in Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, Law & Literature, and the Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities among others, and she was a co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021).
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© Peter Rigaud
Prof. Eva Weber-Guskar
Ruhr-University Bochum | Ethics and Philosophy of Emotions
E-mail: eva.weber-guskar@rub.de
Prof. Wivian Weller
University of Brasília (Brazil) | Education, Sociology of Education
E-mail: wivian.weller@college-uaruhr.de
Wivian Weller is a full professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Brasília (Brazil) and a research fellow of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She obtained a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Science in Education as well as a doctorate in Sociology from Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). She was a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University (USA) from 2012 to 2013 and at the Department of Sociology at the University of Campinas (Brazil) from 2019 to 2020.
Wivian Weller’s research focuses primarily on the sociology of education and educational inequalities as well as international comparative school and youth research. She has analysed political and educational orientations as well as the participation of young people in formal education in Brazil, Germany and China. She has also conducted empirical studies on several reform initiatives in school and higher education systems. Another focus of her work is devoted to theoretical and methodological issues, and the development of praxeological sociology of knowledge and the documentary method. She was responsible for introducing the documentary method, based on Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge and developed for reconstructive social research by Ralf Bohnsack, to Brazil in the early 2000s. She has published articles, books and book chapters in English, German, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish.
Website
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© Daniel Schumann
Prof. Nicolle Pfaff
University of Duisburg-Essen | Educational Studies; Migration and Inequality Research
E-mail: nicolle.pfaff@uni-due.de
An overview of all former Senior Fellows hosted by the College is available here:
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© UDE / Fabian Strauch
Prof. Elena Beregow
College for Social Sciences and Humanities & TU Dortmund University & University of Duisburg-Essen | Cultural Sociology
Phone: +49 201 183 65 66
E-mail: elena.beregow@college-uaruhr.de
Elena Beregow is a junior professor at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities, TU Dortmund University and the University of Duisburg-Essen. She leads the research group 'Sweat – Sociology of Transpiration in the Age of Global Warming'. Her research is situated at the intersection of sociological theory and cultural sociology, with a particular interest in the sociology of the senses, metaphors, microbes, and the social dimensions of temperature. She also explores sociological writing and theorising, as well as pop culture, affects, and atmospheres.
Elena Beregow studied sociology in Göttingen, Hamburg, and Copenhagen and completed her PhD at the University of Hamburg with a dissertation on thermal figures in social theory, focusing on fermentation as both a sociological concept and a material practice. From 2020 to 2025 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich.
Website
Research Group 'Sweat – Sociology of Transpiration in the Age of Global Warming'
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© Aliona Kardash
Prof. Martina Brandt
TU Dortmund University | Social Structure and Sociology of Ageing Societies
E-mail: martina.brandt@tu-dortmund.de
Martina Brandt is Professor for Social Structure and Sociology of Ageing Societies at TU Dortmund University, Vice Dean of Research at the Department of Social Sciences, spokesperson of the research training group ‘New challenges in ageing societies’ (Hans Böckler Foundation) and head of the Master's programme ‘Ageing Societies’ at TU Dortmund University. Until 2025, she held the chair of the Expert Commission on the Ninth Government Report on Older People, and she is involved in the central coordination of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) as Area Coordinator Family and Social Networks. She researches and teaches in the field of ageing in Europe and is interested in family, health and well-being in the life course, care and social support, social inequality and social policy as well as methods of empirical research on ageing.
Website
https://sag.sowi.tu-dortmund.de/en/professorship/team/prof-dr-martina-brandt/
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© Damian Gorczany
Prof. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Ruhr-University Bochum | Media Studies / Gender Studies
E-mail: astrid.deuber-mankowsky@rub.de
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is Professor emerita of Media Studies and Gender Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. Before joining Ruhr University Bochum, she taught at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft at Humboldt-Universität Berlin from 1996 to 2004. She is co-founder and was editor of the journal Die Philosophin. Forum für feministische Theorie und Philosophie from 1990 to 2004. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, USA (2007), visiting professor at the Centre d’études du vivant, Université Paris VII – Diderot, France (2010), senior fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany (2013), and Max Kade Professor at Columbia University (2012 and 2017), UC Berkeley (2022), Northwestern University (2023), Johns Hopkins University (2024) and Yale University, USA (2024). She is associate member of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), and spokesperson of the scientific board of the Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin. Her research focuses on topics in critical, feminist and queer theory, media philosophy and epistemology, temporality and media aesthetics, media anthropology and theories of play, as well as Jewish philosophy.
Website
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© Anders Wahlund
Prof. Martin Karlsson
University of Duisburg-Essen | Health Economics
E-mail: martin.karlsson@uni-due.de
Martin Karlsson has been Professor of Economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2012, holding the Chair of Health Economics. Prior to this, he has held positions at Technische Universität Darmstadt, the University of Oslo (Norway), the University of Oxford (UK), and Cass Business School in London (UK). He received his doctoral degree from the European University Institute in 2007.
In addition to his role at the Chair of Health Economics, Martin is a research fellow of the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), a guest professor at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and Director of CINCH, a national centre for research on health economics. He regularly organises international academic conferences and engages in collaborative research projects across Europe and beyond.
Martin Karlsson’s research focuses on understanding the drivers of improvements in human health and socio-economic outcomes over the past century, with particular attention to the interplay between these factors. He investigates the long-term causal effects of investments in human capital early in life, often exploiting historical policy interventions and linking digitised historical data with modern administrative datasets. Other areas of research include the economics of health insurance, ageing and long-term care, and sickness absence. His work has been published in top economics journals.
Daniel Kühnle is Professor of Economics, with a focus on labour market and health economics, at the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, University of Duisburg-Essen. He holds a PhD in Economics from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). Prior to joining the University of Duisburg-Essen, he held research positions at the University of Melbourne (Australia) and at FAU.
His research lies at the intersection of health, labour, and family economics from an applied micro-econometric perspective. Substantively, his work examines how public policies and socio-economic conditions shape health, well-being, labour supply, and family outcomes over the life course. Methodologically, his research draws on quasi-experimental designs and rich administrative and survey data. His work has been published in leading international journals including the Economic Journal, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Politics, Journal of Urban Economics, and Demography.
Daniel Kühnle is Deputy Director of the health economics research institute CINCH in Essen. He is a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) and at the Labor and Socio-Economic Research Center (LASER) of FAU, and he serves as a member of the standing field committees for Health Economics and Population Economics of the German Economic Association. He is also a senior faculty member of the Ruhr Graduate School in Economics (RGS Econ).
Prof. Christine Morgenstern
Ruhr University Bochum | Law, Criminology
E-mail: christine.morgenstern@rub.de
Christine Morgenstern is a lawyer and criminologist with research interests in human rights in the criminal justice system, gender aspects in criminology, and comparative criminal justice. Since 2023, she has been Professor of Criminology at the Faculty of Law of Ruhr University Bochum where she teaches criminology and criminal law. She also directs the continuing education Master’s programme in Criminology, Criminalistics, and Police Studies there. Prior to this, she was Professor for Criminal Law and Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). Currently, her work engages with prisoner’s rights and with gender aspects of criminalisation processes.
Website
https://www.kriminologie.rub.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4&Itemid=117
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© Daniel Schumann
Prof. Nicolle Pfaff
University of Duisburg-Essen | Educational Studies; Migration and Inequality Research
E-mail: nicolle.pfaff@uni-due.de
Nicolle Pfaff leads the working group ‘Migration and Inequality Research’ at the Faculty of Education at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her research focuses on educational inequality from a spatial and institutional perspective. She also works on political learning of young people. Her current research involves studies on (anti-)discrimination and youth, urban segregation and education, and trust in education. During the last years she published several studies on how young people learn to deal with discriminatory knowledge and habitualise discrimination-critical thinking and behaviour. In the fields of youth and school research, she argues against research perspectives that are shaped by methodological nationalism and argues for engaging with transnational and diversity-oriented perspectives.
Recent editorial projects include co-edited anthologies on youth research (Pädagogische Institutionen des Jugendalters in der Krise (2024) and Jugend(en). 70. Beiheft der Zeitschrift für Pädagogik (2024)) as well as a co-edited volume on (de)institutionalisation of education, (De)Institutionalisierung von Bildung und Erziehung (2024).
Website
https://www.uni-due.de/biwi/migrations-ungleichheitsforschung/pfaff.shtml
Anja Tervooren is Full Professor of Education with a focus on childhood research at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her work focuses on childhood and difference, theories and methodology in educational studies, as well as gender and disability in childhood and youth. Currently, she is working with a group of researchers at the universities Wuppertal and Duisburg-Essen to investigate the (de)institutionalisation of education. Her individual project investigates early childhood between child day care, and integration assistance. Moreover, she works on questions of methodology and specialises in the field of ethnography, with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches.
After completing her PhD in educational anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin on the topic of gender in childhood, Anja Tervooren worked at Goethe University Frankfurt and as a junior professor specialising in education and culture at the University of Hamburg. She is strongly involved in the German Educational Research Association (GERA) | Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft (DGfE), of which she was also Chair, and she has published numerous books and essays on the fundamentals of educational science and the topic of unequal upbringing.
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© Konstantinos Evangelidis
Prof. Margarita Voulgaropoulou
Ruhr University Bochum | Art History, Mediterranean Studies
Margarita Voulgaropoulou is Junior Professor of History of Materiality in trans-Mediterranean Contexts at Ruhr-University Bochum as of 2020. Previously, she has worked as a researcher at the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies of Central European University, Budapest (Hungary) in the ‘OTTOCONFESSION’ project, and at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University (USA). He holds a PhD in Art History from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece).
Margarita Voulgaropoulou’s research focuses on intercultural encounters and religious conflicts in the Adriatic Sea in the early modern period during the rapid expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Her work seeks to show how the confessional coexistence of Orthodox and Catholic populations on the Adriatic Sea affected material culture. Through the combined examination of archival sources and visual material, with a focus on icon painting, her research traces intersections in the movements of people and objects in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the eastern Mediterranean and the Adriatic as spaces of intercultural and transcultural exchange.
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© Peter Rigaud
Prof. Eva Weber-Guskar
Ruhr-University Bochum | Ethics and Philosophy of Emotions
E-mail: eva.weber-guskar@rub.de
Eva Weber-Guskar is a professor of ethics and philosophy of emotions at the Institute of Philosophy I at Ruhr University Bochum. She is currently working on ethical aspects of theories of the good life, including the temporality of emotions. On the other hand, she works in the field of the philosophy of artificial intelligence, focusing on the ethics of affective computing. She is interested in a critical analysis of the understanding of emotions in AI contexts generally and investigates the possibility of appropriate emotional relationships with social chatbots and similar applications. She was a principal investigator (PI) in the interdisciplinary research group ‘INTERACT! New Forms of Social Interaction with Intelligent Systems’ from 2021 to 2024. Before taking up her position in Bochum in 2019, she held guest professorships in Berlin, Vienna (Austria), Zurich (Switzerland) and Erlangen (Germany), and was a visiting scholar at New York University (USA).
Recent publications include:
Weber-Guskar, Eva (2024): Gefühle der Zukunft. Wie wir mit emotionaler KI unser Leben verändern. Ullstein.
Weber-Guskar, Eva (2021): ‘How to feel about emotionalized artificial intelligence? When robot pets, holograms, and chatbots become affective partners’. Ethics and Information Technology 23(4), pp. 601−610.
Weber-Guskar, Eva (2023): ‘Temporal Textures. Time, Meaning, and the Good Life’. European Journal of Philosophy 31, 2023 (4), pp. 1091−1104.
Manipal Academy of Higher Education (India) | Cultural Anthropology
College for Social Sciences and Humanities & TU Dortmund University & University of Duisburg-Essen | Cultural Sociology
University of South Africa (South Africa) | Political Science and Governance
TU Dortmund University | Social Structure and Sociology of Ageing Societies
George Mason University (USA) | Health Administration and Policy
University of Duisburg-Essen | Economics, Health Economics
Bahir Dar University (Ethiopia) | Social Anthropology, Migration Studies
University of Duisburg-Essen | Education
Goldsmiths, University of London (UK) | History of Philosophy, German and Comparative Literature
Ruhr-University Bochum | Media Studies / Gender Studies
Mesrop Mashtots Research Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Armenia) | Historical Theology, Religious Studies
Ruhr University Bochum | Art History, Mediterranean Studies
University of Ibadan (Nigeria) | Sociology, Criminology
Ruhr University Bochum | Law, Criminology
Georgetown University (USA) | Law, Literary Studies
Ruhr-University Bochum | Ethics and Philosophy of Emotions
University of Brasília (Brazil) | Education, Sociology of Education
University of Duisburg-Essen | Educational Studies; Migration and Inequality Research