The first group of international Senior Fellows has completed their research stays at the College. Having spent six months in Essen during the spring and summer of 2024, what are their perspectives on their hosting institution, the University Alliance Ruhr, and the Ruhr region? In this interview feature, the visiting researchers share their impressions, personal views, and experiences: what they yielded from their fellowships, how the collaboration with their tandem partners went, and which results they have achieved in their research projects.
Małgorzata Sugiera:
"The call for applications was published shortly after I and Dorota Sajewska organised a stream “Memoryscape of Future Communities” at the Memory Studies Association’s 7th Annual Conference “Communities & Change” in Newcastle, UK, in July 2023. That is, it was published exactly in the moment we were looking for a possibility to continue our research on the intersection of performativity, memory, and waste studies with a many-authored volume in view, mostly with researchers from Poland and Germany. The call not only came in the right moment, but appeared to be tailor-made just for us. And the fellowship at the UA Ruhr has met all our expectations. It turned out to be an excellent environment to carry out our project and find collaborators for the planned more ambitious and innovative future research."
Sule Emmanuel Egya:
"My motivation was largely the time frame of the fellowship. I was looking for something that is between six and 12 months to enable me complete work on my book. The period of the College fellowship therefore fit my plan. I was also motivated by the research facilities enumerated in the call for applications. The space and facilities available for the fellows attracted me."
Sule Emmanuel Egya:
Definitely. I was able to achieve my objective of completing my manuscript. That is a big goal achieved. Besides, I was able to interact fruitfully and establish a network with colleagues. The ice on the cake for me was the convening of a workshop on Decolonial Ecology that turned out to be quite successful.
Erdem Özgür:
The atmosphere at the College was incredibly supportive and inspiring. Among the nine other fellows, I found everyone to be nice, humble, hardworking, and successful, which fostered a collaborative and motivating environment. The administrative staff went above and beyond to be helpful and kind, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable experience. Additionally, the facilities were excellent, providing everything needed for productive work and personal growth. Overall, the combination of exceptional people and top-notch resources created a uniquely positive and enriching atmosphere at the College.
Manuel Souto-Otero:
The College provides an excellent working environment. The staff provides outstanding support and there is a vibrant intellectual atmosphere. The College is a welcoming space where fellows from diverse disciplines are able to connect, collaborate, and become part of a dynamic academic community, which benefits from strong ties with the alliance‘s constituent universities.
Marta García Morcillo:
The numerous opportunities for formal, as well as informal knowledge and academic exchanges between fellows provided at and by the College have been very enjoyable and inspiring experiences to me. They have undoubtedly contributed to expand my horizon beyond my limited field of expertise, and have helped me imagine and explore new, creative and motivating avenues of collaborative and interdisciplinary research.
Douglas Wegner:
The Senior Fellowship at the College represented a great opportunity to explore a new topic and research directions. Thanks to the valuable discussions at the colloquia, workshop, and joint work with my tandem partner, I could advance my research project quickly and reach relevant outcomes. I also want to highlight that learning from other fellow researchers’ perspectives and topics helped me expand my comprehension of research in social sciences and humanities. Lastly, the College’s international atmosphere was an amazing opportunity to develop an open and global mindset.
Mila Ganeva:
As a fellow at the College in Essen I enjoyed the friendly collegial atmosphere and perfect working conditions for intellectual exploration and writing, aided by an incredibly supportive staff as well as generous resources for conference travel and archival research. The Wednesday colloquia, the workshop that I co-organised, and the multiple informal conversations with the other fellows on an almost daily basis enriched and expanded my perspective as a scholar and thinker. I was inspired, motivated, and focused throughout my stay at the College, which made it possible to achieve the goals I have set for myself.
I am grateful to the UA Ruhr, the staff and leadership at the College, and the fellows in the first cohort for these incredible experiences in Essen.
Stephen Brown:
This fellowship has been wonderful and I am sad that it is coming to an end. I have truly enjoyed my interactions with the other fellows and members of the UA Ruhr academic community. The College has proven to be very… collegial! I also got a lot of writing done, which is extremely rewarding. Five stars, highly recommended.
Małgorzata Sugiera:
I got to know Dorota Sajewska, a PhD student at the University of Warsaw at that time, three decades ago, and we have stayed in touch ever since. However, our closer scholarly cooperation started in 2016 when I was awarded a research grant “Performances of Memory” within the BEETHOVEN scheme, funded jointly by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) and the German Research Foundation (DFG). More recently, we co-edited a volume “Crisis and Communitas: Performative Concepts of Commonality in Arts and Politics”, published by Routledge (2023). I am really happy that the fellowship project budget has allowed me to cover costs of proofreading of our next co-edited volume which has been prepared as the main outcome of my fellowship and will most probably be published in the first half of the next year. It would have been difficult to find a similar funding at my home institution. In this respect, not all countries within EU are equal yet.
Mila Ganeva:
As a result of my fellowship, among other things I was able to complete a book proposal and land a contract for a monograph tentatively entitled “The Photography of Elli Marcus and Weimar Nostalgia,” to be published in 2026. A co-authored (with Gudrun König), interdisciplinary article on fashion photography is also in the works. In fact, much of the progress on my research project I owe to the regular exchanges with my tandem partner Gudrun König (TU Dortmund University), who pushed me to expand and reconceive the conceptual framework of my project and who facilitated valuable connections to leading German experts in the fields of photography, theater, fashion, and exile.
Małgorzata Sugiera:
Not only do we intend to continue working together, but have already started to write a proposal for a bilateral research project which will be submitted under the multilateral Weave Programme in the beginning of 2025. Our current idea is to focus on the topic of breathing in performing arts which has been increasingly important in the wake of the last pandemic and the ecological catastrophe we are facing.
Sule Emmanuel Egya:
I was able to establish new contacts including Prof. Dr Barbara Buchenau and Prof. Dr Jens Gurr. These are invaluable contacts, apart from my tandem partner, for future collaboration.
Marta García Morcillo:
The University Alliance Ruhr is a wonderful idea and institution that brings together the rich and unique historical, cultural and natural heritage of the region and its dynamic cities. I particularly appreciate the Alliance’s extraordinary inclusive and collaborative ethos. This spirit is translated into a genuine interest in supporting original ideas and projects. The passion for ground-breaking research in any field makes this institution a unique place.
Mila Ganeva:
Apart from the clear academic and professional gains, this residential fellowship at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities in Essen presented an amazing opportunity to explore the rich cultural offerings of the cities in the Rhine-Ruhr region. As a scholar of visual culture and professor of German Studies at my home university in the United States, I was particularly interested in museums, exhibitions, and art collections. So, I consider myself particularly fortunate to visit not only the Museum Folkwang and Ruhr Museum in Essen and the world-renowned attractions in Cologne and Düsseldorf, but also some hidden gems in Duisburg (Lehmbruck Museum), Osnabrück (Felix Nussbaum Collection), Gelsenkirchen (Kinetic Art Collection), Ahlen and Mülheim an der Ruhr (Expressionism). All of these experiences were just an hour or two away from the College on the Deutschland-Ticket! I am sure that the rich insights I gathered and the photographs I took will find their way to my classroom when I return to teaching in September.
Marta García Morcillo:
The dialogues between past and present stand at the centre of my research. The post-industrial cities of the Ruhr region offer the unique chance to discover and explore a very rich and fascinating cultural, historical and natural heritage that has experienced huge transformations in the last decades. Many of the material and immaterial traces of the passage of time still await to be fully studied.
Sule Emmanuel Egya:
I will send my manuscript to a reputable publisher to get published. I am looking forward to new opportunities in my research field. And it seems the connections I have made during the fellowship would be of great help.
Douglas Wegner:
The fellowship has not only enriched my academic journey but also empowered me to contribute to theory and practice. The intense work with my tandem partner over six months, the colloquium, and the workshop we organised at the College have all culminated in a conceptual-empirical paper and a policy brief. These outputs have already been presented at conferences and will soon be submitted to a scientific journal. The policy brief, in particular, is a direct channel to policymakers and practitioners, ensuring that our research will not only contribute to theory but also influence practice.
Manuel Souto-Otero:
I absolutely recommend others to apply for a fellowship at the College. This fellowship is an excellent opportunity to be part of a dynamic academic community that values and supports scholarly excellence. Collaboration with my tandem partner enabled us to carry out an exciting project on the future of work and open up promising areas for future collaboration. Besides, the College is an exceptionally friendly place, and the community was truly international, which I highly valued.
Prof. Stephen Brown
University of Ottawa (Canada) | Political Science
Stephen Brown is a professor at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, where he is also affiliated with the School of International Development and Global Studies. His research focuses mainly on the intersection of domestic and international politics. He has published on democratisation, political violence, peacebuilding and transitional justice/rule of law in Angola, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Rwanda. He has conducted research on foreign aid in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mongolia, and Peru, as well as on global COVID-19 vaccine inequities. He is now primarily carrying out research on international LGBTQI+ rights. He is completing a research project on international actors’ efforts to defend the rights of sexual and gender minorities in the Global South. His latest project is on how people in some African countries, such as Botswana, Mauritius, and Kenya, use domestic courts to try to force their governments to decriminalise homosexuality. He has been a visiting scholar at universities and research institutes in Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
Website
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. Sule Emmanuel Egya
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai (Nigeria) | African Literature, Environmental Humanities
Sule Egya is professor of African Literature and Environmental Humanities at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria. His research interests include literature and environment, African migration writing, knowledge production in Africa, and decolonial discourse. His current research examines environmental imagination in African 20th century literature. His monographs include:
Sule Egya has co-edited “Studies in Scientific and Cultural Ecology” (SevHage, 2021) and “Orality, Textuality, Society: New Perspectives on Nigerian Literature and Culture” (SevHage, 2023). He also writes fiction and poetry under the pen-name E. E. Sule. He is the author of the novels “Sterile Sky” (winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize Africa Region, 2013) and “Makwala” (ANA Prose Prize, 2019) and the poetry collection “What the Sea Told Me” (winner of the ANA Gabriel Okara Prize, 2009).
Prof. Patricia Plummer
University of Duisburg-Essen | English and Postcolonial Studies
E-mail: patricia.plummer@uni-due.de
Prof. Mila Ganeva
Miami University Ohio (USA) | German Studies, Film Studies
Mila Ganeva is Professor of German and affiliate member of the Film Studies programme at Miami University in Ohio. She is the author of Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 (Camden House, 2008) and Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: Between Nazism and Cold War, 1945-1953 (Camden House, 2018) as well as numerous articles on fashion history and German film. Her essay on fashion photographers in Berlin of the 1920s was included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “The New Woman Behind the Camera” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (July 2021-January 2022). Most recently she published about the costumes and set designs in the popular German TV-series “Babylon Berlin” and is completing an article “Dressing Babylon Berlin for a Global Audience: Extravaganza, Glamour, and Grit” forthcoming in 2024. She is currently writing a book-length study on “Cabaret and Film: Synergy and Competition in the Weimar Republic.”
Website
Prof. Gudrun König
TU Dortmund University | Cultural Anthropology of Textiles
Asst. Prof. Marta García Morcillo
Durham University (UK) | Ancient History
Marta García Morcillo is an Ancient Historian, currently Research Fellow at Durham University and UK Principal Investigator of the AHRC-DFG collaborative project “Twisted Transfers: Discursive Constructions of Corruption in Ancient Greece and Rome” (2020-24). Previously, she worked as Senior Lecturer and Lecturer at the Universities of Roehampton (London), Wales TSD, Leicester and Dresden; and was Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Universities of Heidelberg and Potsdam. Her research revolves around the study of ancient economies, with a particular interest in Roman financial activities, economic mentality and motivation, and the relationship between markets and ideas of value. She also works on the reception of antiquity in modern visual cultures, with a special interest in cinema, advertising and printed media. Marta is cofounder of the international networks "Imagines: Antiquity in the Visual and Performing Arts" and "Engendering Ancient Economies".
Website
Prof. Florian Freitag
University of Duisburg-Essen | American Studies
Prof. Mustafa Erdem Özgür
Dokuz Eylül University Izmir (Turkey) | Economics
M. Erdem Özgür is Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Business, Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir. Previously, he was employed by Bülent Ecevit University, Zonguldak, where he had served as vice director of the Maritime Business School. He received his PhD degree from George Mason University in 2005, and his MSc and BSc degrees from Middle East Technical University. His research interests include economic history and history of economic thought with a specific focus on the 19th century. He has papers presented at various professional conferences on his research interests. He has published articles and book chapters as well as co-edited books on the economic history of and history of economic thought in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Europe, and the US. The courses he taught include history of economic thought, institutional economics, economic history, and principles of economics.
Website
https://debis.deu.edu.tr/akademik/index.php?cat=3&akod=20120252
Prof. Jakob Kapeller
University of Duisburg-Essen | Socio-Economics
E-mail: jakob.kapeller@uni-due.de
Prof. Manuel Souto-Otero
Cardiff University (UK) | Education Policy, Sociology
Manuel Souto-Otero is a Professor of Education Policy and Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University (UK), where he is Director of Research and Head of the Education Research Group. He has published widely on the link between education and work (in particular digitalisation, the future of work and its implications for skills development), social stratification and inequalities, and non-formal education. He has recently completed a project on “Digital Disruption and the Future of Work: reimagining education, skills and employ-ability” for Skills Futures Singapore, and has also undertaken a large number of research projects for international organisations (European Commission, European Parliament, Cedefop, UNESCO, OECD), national governments (Belgium, Spain, Estonia, UK), and think tanks and third sector organisations (including the European Youth Forum and the Institute for Public Policy Research). He is an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Associate Editor of the Journal Education and Work, and Advisory Board Member for the Journal of Education Policy.
Prof. Birgit Apitzsch
Ruhr University Bochum | Sociology of Work, Economy, and Welfare
Prof. Małgorzata Sugiera
Jagiellonian University Cracow (Poland) | Performativity Studies
Małgorzata Sugiera is Professor and Head of the Department for Performativity Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and Head of the Department for Performativity Studies. She was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, DAAD, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the American Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research concentrates on performativity theories, environmental and decolonial studies, particularly in the context of the history of science. She published twelve scholarly books in Polish, translates scholarly books and co-edited several books in English and German, most recently with Dorota Sajewska for “Crisis and Communitas: Performative Concepts of Commonality in Arts and Politics” (Routledge 2022).
Website
Prof. Dorota Sajewska
Ruhr University Bochum | Theatre Studies
Prof. Douglas Wegner
Fundação Dom Cabral (Brazil) | Business Administration
Douglas Wegner is a professor of the Professional Master in Administration at Fundação Dom Cabral, a business school in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He is currently co-leader of the track on “Interorganizational and Interpersonal Relations” at Anpad, the National Association of Graduate Programs and Research in Administration, and member of the research group Collab4Good, which focuses on grand challenges, collaborative governance, innovation ecosystems, entrepreneurial ecosystems, social innovation, and inter organisational cooperation. His current research interests include collaborative strategies and networks, network governance, and network orchestration. He also works as associate editor of Revista Base for the topics of Collaboration and Interorganisational Relations. Besides the academic activities, Douglas worked as a business consultant, forming and developing strategic networks in Brazil. Douglas Wegner holds a PhD in Business Administration from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2011), Brazil. He was a visiting researcher at TU Dortmund University (2019) and the University of Sevilla (2016) and published various articles in peer reviewed journals.
Website
Prof. Jürgen Howaldt
TU Dortmund University, Social Research Centre Dortmund | Sociology, social innovation research
E-mail: juergen.howaldt@tu-dortmund.de