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.
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Dr Althea Greenan
Goldsmiths University of London (UK) | Curator
E-mail: althea.greenan@college-uaruhr.de
Dr Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths University of London curating the Women’s Art Library (WAL) collection. She programmes artistic research supporting artists, students and academics working with the wide range of materials and archives in the WAL. This work is the subject of a film by Holly Antrum commissioned by the Art360 Foundation titled “Yes to the Work!: The Women’s Art Library”.
Additional roles include co-curating the Animating Archives and advisory to “Feminist Art Making Histories” (an oral history, digital humanities project, funded by the Irish Research Council and the AHRC), and “Women in Revolt” (Tate Britain 2023-24, curated by Linsey Young).
She has written on the work of women artists since the 1980s and her doctoral research on the 35mm slide collection features in the anthology “Of Other Spaces” (edited by Sophia Hao, Sternberg Press 2019) and special issue of the journal “Women: a cultural review” (edited by Dr Victoria Horne, Taylor and Francis 2019). Writing on the Women’s Art Library includes a chapter in “Feminism and Museums”, volume 1 (edited by Dr Jenna C Ashton, MuseumsETC 2017) and the forthcoming article “We’re in the Library!: welcoming creative practices, sharing responsibilities of access” in Art Libraries Journal July 2024.
Althea Greenan will begin her fellowship at the College in November 2024.
Prof. Tahani Nadim
College for Social Sciences and Humanities & Ruhr University Bochum | Sociology of Science, Empirical Cultural Studies
E-mail: tahani.nadim@college-uaruhr.de
Prof. Patrício V. Langa
Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique) | Sociology, Comparative Higher Education, Science and Policy Studies
E-mail: patricio.langa@college-uaruhr.de
Patrício Langa is a sociologist and Professor of Comparative Higher Education, Policy, and Innovation Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University (U.E.M.), Mozambique, where he formally advised the Rector on strategic planning. Langa has been a research fellow and visiting higher education and science studies professor at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, University of Bonn, Germany, and the Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He also collaborates with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden), Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA) and Autonomous University of Lisbon (Portugal), and formerly collaborated with the Danube University Krems (Austria).
Professor Langa served as the first executive director for external evaluation in the National Council on Higher Education Quality Assurance and Accreditation in Mozambique (CNAQ), and continues to serve on the board of non-executive directors. He is the founding president of the Mozambican Sociological Association (A.M.S.). and established the African Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (ACHER).
Patrício Langa holds a BA in Social Sciences, a BA Hons in Sociology from U.E.M., a MEd in Higher Education Studies and a PhD in Sociology and Education from the University of Cape Town. His research interest is in the intersection of sociology, higher education and science studies.
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Prof. Liudvika Leišytė
TU Dortmund University | Higher Education Research
E-mail: liudvika.leisyte@tu-dortmund.de
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Prof. Zethu Matebeni
University of Fort Hare (South Africa) | Gender and Queer Studies, Sociology
Zintombizethu Matebeni, popularly known as zethu, holds the National Research Foundation (NRF) South Africa Research Chair in Sexualities, Genders and Queer Studies at the University of Fort Hare. With a background in sociology and ethnographic methods, Matebeni has been a catalyst of African queer studies, working at the intersections of race, class, gender diversity, and sexuality in post-colonial Africa. Collaborating with activists, scholars, and artists, they have produced innovative research and interventions on queer issues, critical race studies, and decolonisation, including the #RhodesMustFall Movement and #AlternativeInclusivePride.
Matebeni’s notable works include "Reclaiming Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on Sexual and Gender Identities" (2014), "Queer in Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism"(2018), "Beyond the Mountain: Queer Life in 'Africa's Gay Capital'" (2020), and “Nongayindoda” (2021) in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies. Zethu Matebeni has been Visiting Professor at the Women’s Gender and Sexualities Studies (WGSS) Department at Yale University and at the Marie Jahoda Centre for International Gender Studies at Ruhr University Bochum.
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Prof. Henriette Gunkel
Ruhr University Bochum | Media Studies, Transformation of Audiovisual Media
Prof. Imke Meyer
University of Illinois Chicago (USA) | German Studies
E-mail: imke.meyer@college-uaruhr.de
Imke Meyer is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research is focused on 19th-21st century German-language literature, film and thought. She has particular expertise in 19th-century realism, Viennese Modernism, Kafka, and post-WWII literature and film. Her research frequently engages narrative theory, gender and queer theory, critical theory, and visual culture.
Imke Meyer has published two monographs: „Jenseits der Spiegel kein Land: Ich-Fiktionen in Texten von Franz Kafka und Ingeborg Bachmann“ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001) and „Männlichkeit und Melodram: Arthur Schnitzlers erzählende Schriften“ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010) as well as numerous articles on a diverse range of authors and filmmakers, including Ludwig Tieck, Franz Grillparzer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Elfriede Jelinek, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Haneke, Barbara Albert, and Arthur Schnitzler.
Imke Meyer is the recipient of a DAAD grant for research in contemporary literature. She has held a visiting professorship at the University of Pennsylvania and was the Helen Herrmann Chair at Bryn Mawr College before moving to the University of Illinois, Chicago. She has served as president both for the Austrian Studies Association and for the Pacific Modern and Ancient Literature Association. She is the founding and current editor of the book series “New Directions in German Studies”, published by Bloomsbury Press.
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Prof. Sigrid Nieberle
TU Dortmund University | Modern and Contemporary German Literature, Gender and Diversity
E-mail: sigrid.nieberle@tu-dortmund.de
Prof. Irven M. Resnick
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA) | Philosophy and Religion
E-mail: irven.resnick@college-uaruhr.de
Irven M. Resnick (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is a professor of Philosophy and Religion and has held the Chair of Excellence in Judaic Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA) since 1990. Resnick has received numerous grants and awards, including a DAAD Research Visit Grant to Germany. He has been a Corresponding Fellow at the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Bar-Ilan University (Israel), and from 2003 to 2018 he was a Senior Associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (UK), where he also directed four National Endowment for the Humanities summer institutes for university faculty. From 2006 to 2008, he was an associate of the sub-faculty of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University’s Oriental Institute. For fall semester 2006, he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.
Irven Resnick has published nineteen volumes (as author, translator, or editor) and more than sixty academic journal articles.
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Prof. Alexandra Cuffel
Ruhr University Bochum, CERES | Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times
E-mail: alexandra.cuffel@rub.de
Prof. Ahmad H. Sa'di
Ben Gurion University (Israel) | Political Sociology
E-mail: ahmad.sadi@college-uaruhr.de
Ahmad H. Sa’di is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University. He has served as a visiting professor at the universities of Columbia (USA), Waseda (Japan), and the National University of Singapore.
He is the co-editor of “Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory” (with Lila Abu-Lughod), the author of “Thorough Surveillance: The Genesis of Israeli Policies of Population Management, Surveillance and Political Control towards the Palestinians”, as well as the co-editor of “Decolonizing the Study of Palestine: Indigenous Perspectives and Settler Colonialism After Elia Zureik” (with Nur Masalha).
His academic research has been published in eight languages including English, German, Japanese, and Portuguese.
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Prof. Franziska Martinsen
University of Duisburg-Essen | Political Theory
E-mail: franziska.martinsen@uni-due.de
Prof. Heidi Schlipphacke
University of Illinois Chicago (USA) | German Studies
Heidi Schlipphacke is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she also holds an affiliate appointment in Classics and Mediterranean Studies. She has published widely on German, European, and American literature, film and thought, with particular attention to aesthetic form and its ability to uniquely reflect on social and political structures that are often camouflaged in the real world. Thematically, her scholarship has focused on gender and sexuality, on kinship, on queer aesthetics, on affect, on the aesthetics and ethics of the nation-state, on intermediality, and on temporality.
Heidi Schlipphacke has published the monographs “Nostalgia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film” (Bucknell UP, 2010) and “The Aesthetics of Kinship: Form and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century” (Bucknell UP, 2024) as well as a co-edited volume on the global cultural resonance of Elisabeth of Austria. She has edited and co-edited journal issues on topics including “Habsburg Nostalgia” (Journal of Austrian Studies, 2014); “Lessing, The European Enlightenment, and the First Sexual Revolution” (Lessing Yearbook, 2017); and “Queer German Studies: A Forum” (The German Quarterly, 2024), and has published numerous articles on related topics.
She is the recipient of grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Fulbright Foundation, and the UIC Institute for the Humanities. She will serve as president of the Goethe Society of North America beginning in 2025.
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Prof. Sigrid Nieberle
TU Dortmund University | Modern and Contemporary German Literature, Gender and Diversity
E-mail: sigrid.nieberle@tu-dortmund.de
Prof. Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah
Redeemer’s University (Nigeria) | English Linguistics
Foluke O. Unuabonah is a professor at the English Department, Redeemer’s University, Ede, Nigeria. Her main areas of research include (corpus) pragmatics and discourse analysis. She has published articles on (borrowed) discourse-pragmatic features in Nigerian English as well as borrowed discourse-pragmatic features in Ghanaian, Kenyan, South African and Tanzanian Englishes. She has also investigated social semiotic resources in multimodal texts such as memes and posters, and has explored discourse-pragmatic items in quasi-judicial public hearings.
Foluke Unuabonah has just completed a research project on different speech acts (requests, offers, apologies, refusals, and thanking) in Nigerian English, in a joint project with colleagues at the University of Münster, Germany, and has also compiled the Historical Corpus of English in Nigeria with other colleagues in Redeemer’s University. In her present project, she is carrying out a comparative study of English discourse-pragmatic features, including pragmatic markers, intensifiers and quotatives in Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Ugandan Englishes.
She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Münster, under the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as well as the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa.
Prof. Christiane Meierkord
Ruhr University Bochum | English Linguistics
Prof. Alexandra Cuffel
Ruhr University Bochum, CERES | Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times
E-mail: alexandra.cuffel@rub.de
Alexandra Cuffel is Professor of Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times at the Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. Until 2012 she has been Adjunct Professor of History at the College of New Jersey and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, NYC. From 2004 to 2008 she was Assistant Professor of pre-modern World History at Macalester College. Prior to that she was Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Visiting Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She received several fellowships, among them a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2007, the Women’s Studies in Religion Fellowship from Harvard Divinity School in 2006, and a fellowship from the Dorot Foundation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996.
Her research focuses on relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages, specifically on the intersections of religious polemic, medical theories and gender both in Western Europe and the Middle East. Further research interests are shared saints’ cults and festivals in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean and "racial" attitudes in the Middle Ages.
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Prof. Henriette Gunkel
Ruhr University Bochum | Media Studies, Transformation of Audiovisual Media
Henriette Gunkel is Professor of Transformation of Audiovisual Media with a special focus on gender and queer theory at the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. Her research focuses on the politics of time from a decolonising, queer-feminist perspective. She is currently working on a monograph entitled “Sand, Atmosphere, Memorialisation”, which deals with remains in the context of colonial extractivism in the Namib Desert. Recent publications include the anthologies “Futures & Fictions” (Repeater 2017, with Ayesha Hameed and Simon O'Sullivan) and “We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions” (Transcript 2019, with kara lynch) as well as the book “Visual Cultures as Time Travel” (Sternberg 2021), co-written with Ayesha Hameed.
Website
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Prof. Liudvika Leišytė
TU Dortmund University | Higher Education Research
E-mail: liudvika.leisyte@tu-dortmund.de
Liudvika Leišytė is Professor of Higher Education and Deputy Director at the Center for Higher Education (zhb) at TU Dortmund University. She holds a PhD degree in Public Administration from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. For ten years, she was involved in and managed various research projects at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (University of Twente), where she is still a visiting senior scholar. She was visiting professor at Nagoya University in Japan in 2019 and Sciences Po in France in 2022.
Prof. Leišytė has actively been involved in a number of international and national research projects studying changing university governance, and management, interdisciplinarity, quality assurance and evaluation, and digitalisation in higher education. In 2018 she received the Emerald Literati Award for the Highly Commended paper 2018 in The Learning Organization international journal.
Liudvika Leišytė has published five (co-edited) books on reforms of higher education, governance of higher education and organisational change in universities. Her sixth book, the “Research Handbook on the Transformation of Higher Education”, was published by Edward Elgar in 2023. Her work has appeared in a number of prestigious international peer-reviewed journals, including Higher Education, Science and Public Policy, Studies in Higher Education, Minerva, Public Management, and Public Administration.
Prof. Leišytė is a member of editorial boards of Higher Education Policy, Triple Helix, The Learning Organization, Social Inclusion, and Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung. She is an Advisory Board member of the Lithuanian Higher Education Quality Assurance Agency delegated by the Lithuanian Parliament Education and Science Committee. In 2023 Prof. Leišytė was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe).
Website
https://hdhf.zhb.tu-dortmund.de/en/professorship/team/liudvika-leisyte
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Prof. Franziska Martinsen
University of Duisburg-Essen | Political Theory
E-mail: franziska.martinsen@uni-due.de
Franziska Martinsen is Professor of Political Theory at the Institute of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Duisburg-Essen, and Director of the Centre for Global Cooperation, an inter-faculty research centre of the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Her research focuses on political theory and the history of ideas, in particular feminist, intersectional and postcolonial theories and critique, theories of democracy and human rights as well as theories of justice. She has published on a wide range of topics relating to radical democratic theories, the critical expansion of human rights, feminist political theory, and the connection between gender studies and political science.
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Prof. Christiane Meierkord
Ruhr University Bochum | English Linguistics
Christiane Meierkord holds the Chair of English Linguistics at Ruhr University Bochum and has previously taught at the universities of Erfurt, Münster and Stockholm, where she was a visiting professor.
She is author of “Interactions across Englishes: Linguistic Choices in Local and International Contact Situations” (2012) and has published extensively on the use of English as a lingua franca, from a descriptive as well as from a sociolinguistic perspective. She has also edited “Ugandan English. Its Sociolinguistics, Structure and Uses in a Globalising Post-Protectorate” (2016), together with Bebwa Isingoma and Saudah Namyalo, and “World Englishes at the Grassroots” (2021), together with Edgar Schneider. She is currently involved in a project that intends to give voice to non-elite users of English, who have often been neglected and marginalised in research on world Englishes in postcolonial settings.
Website
https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/engling/staff/meierkord/index.html.en
Prof. Tahani Nadim
College for Social Sciences and Humanities & Ruhr University Bochum | Sociology of Science, Empirical Cultural Studies
E-mail: tahani.nadim@college-uaruhr.de
Tahani Nadim holds the research professorship ‘Curating Digital Objects of Cultural Knowledge and Memory’ at Ruhr University Bochum and the Collegefor Social Sciences and Humanities. She has previously held a junior professorship in social and cultural anthropology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in a joint appointment with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN). At the MfN she co-lead the ‘Centre for the Humanities of Nature’, which she co-founded in 2018. She was spokesperson and coordinator (together with Meike Hopp, TU Berlin) of the joint research project ‘Museums and society: mapping the social’ (2020–2024). She has worked as a programme manager at the Women’s Art Library in London, an editor at Black Dog Publishing and a researcher in Goldsmiths Library (Open Access, data models and institutional repositories). She also curated exhibitions, collaborated with artists and runs the experimental research unit ‘Bureau for Troubles’.
Tahani Nadim holds a PhD in sociology of science from Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her interdisciplinary research has focused on the politics of data, digitisation and collections, specifically in the context of natural history and biodiversity sciences. Her recent work engages with questions of conservation and preservation, silences in/of memory cultures and the role of archives in human-environment relations.
Prof. Sigrid Nieberle
TU Dortmund University | Modern and Contemporary German Literature, Gender and Diversity
E-mail: sigrid.nieberle@tu-dortmund.de
Sigrid Nieberle is Professor of Modern and Contemporary German Literature with a focus on gender and diversity at TU Dortmund University. She completed her doctorate at LMU München with an interdisciplinary thesis on “FrauenMusikLiteratur” and habilitated at the University of Greifswald on literary biopics. In 2009, she was appointed Professor of Modern German Literature at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg; in 2014, she accepted the appointment to TU Dortmund University.
Sigrid Nieberle is a founding member and has been Managing Director of the Institute for Diversity Studies since 2020. Her research focuses on gender and diversity studies and the intermediality of literature, especially in music and film. She was a visiting professor at the University of Oxford (DAAD Professorial Exchange Program) in 2008, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence (Max Kade Foundation) in 2013, and at the University of Illinois Chicago (dto) in 2019.
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Goldsmiths University of London (UK) | Curator
College for Social Sciences and Humanities & Ruhr University Bochum | Sociology of Science, Empirical Cultural Studies
Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique) | Sociology, Comparative Higher Education, Science and Policy Studies
TU Dortmund University | Higher Education Research
University of Fort Hare (South Africa) | Gender and Queer Studies, Sociology
Ruhr University Bochum | Media Studies, Transformation of Audiovisual Media
University of Illinois Chicago (USA) | German Studies
TU Dortmund University | Modern and Contemporary German Literature, Gender and Diversity
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA) | Philosophy and Religion
Ruhr University Bochum, CERES | Jewish Religion in Past and Present Times
Ben Gurion University (Israel) | Political Sociology
University of Duisburg-Essen | Political Theory
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University of Illinois Chicago (USA) | German Studies
TU Dortmund University | Modern and Contemporary German Literature, Gender and Diversity
Redeemer’s University (Nigeria) | English Linguistics
Ruhr University Bochum | English Linguistics
An overview of all former Senior Fellows hosted by the College is available here: