Team

Tahani Nadim holds the research professorship ‘Curating Digital Objects of Cultural Knowledge and Memory’ at Ruhr University Bochum and the College for Social Sciences and Humanities. She has previously held a junior professorship in social and cultural anthropology at 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.

Jenny Oliveira Caldas is a doctoral researcher in anthropology at the research professorship ‘Curating Digital Objects of Cultural Knowledge and Memory’ as of August 2025. Her research focuses on queer-feminist and postcolonial studies, epistemic knowledge practices, and histories of emancipatory movements. In her dissertation project, she examines the urban and migration history of Afro-Brazilian women* in Zurich. Alongside her academic work, she is active in political education, including with the European Race and Imagery Foundation (ERIF) and in future thinking labs such as the imagineers lab. She has also worked for organisations such as the German Institute for Human Rights and Each one Teach One.

Annika Pretzsch joined the research professorship ‘Curating Digital Objects of Cultural Knowledge and Memory’ as an administrative assistant in August 2025. She attends to all administrative tasks of the group. Before joining the College, she has worked and continues to work at the Faculty of Computer Science at Ruhr University Bochum, where she is also part of the Equal Opportunities team. Previously, she completed a Bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and English at Ruhr University Bochum and the University of Galway (Ireland), and another Bachelor’s degree in Archaeology and Celtic Studies at the University of Bonn.

Nesrin Tanç joined the research professorship ‘Curating Digital Objects of Cultural Knowledge and Memory’ as a postdoctoral researcher in August 2025. She is a literary and cultural scholar and author. Previously, she worked as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen where she completed her PhD in 2021. During her time at the university, she also contributed to the establishment of the Transnational Literary Archive. 

Her dissertation Die Ordnung der Vielfalt (the order of diversity) deals with the literary and cultural heritage of the Ruhr region in the 1970s of the so-called ‘guest workers’ from Turkey. Her new book, Kulturelles Gedächtnis und Literatur (cultural memory and literature) was published in August 2025 and contains insights from her cultural practice work. An artistic work on the theme of memory will be on display from August to October 2025 as part of the ‘Ruhrtriennale’ festival of the arts 2025 in the exhibition ’Between Creating and Collecting. Exploring Duisburg's Inner Harbor’.