Senior Fellows at the College

William Donahue is Professor of European studies, Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German at the University of Notre Dame (USA). A scholar of contemporary German literature and film, Donahue is a concurrent professor of film, television, and theatre. His research interests include contemporary European Studies (migration, refugees, European Union, populism), German literature and film, Holocaust Studies, German Jewish Studies, and art as a form of protest, social engagement and community building. He is the author of Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s "Nazi" Novels and Their Films and The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. 

William Donahue has served as chair of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures. He is co-director of the Notre Dame Berlin Seminar, which brings American scholars of German literary and cultural studies together with experts and leading figures of Germany’s literary scene. He holds a PhD in German Literature from Harvard.

William Donahue has been a visiting scholar at the University of Duisburg-Essen several times and co-editor of andererseits: Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies together with Georg Mein and Rolf Parr.

Website

https://germanandslavic.nd.edu/people/william-donahue

Fazıl Kayıkçı is a Professor of Economics at Yıldız Technical University, Turkey. He has served as a chair of this department for three years. He formerly was a visiting researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen and has published several articles in high-impact journals about development studies, socioeconomics, macroeconomics, and energy economics. He also published books about current account deficit, wage determination, finance and institutions. 

Fazıl Kayıkçı completed projects about human development, demographic transformation, and labour force participation. He is the coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters Design Measures project in a partnership with Zurich University, Rome Tre University, Minho University, WSB University, WSGE University and University of Integrado. He is a member of the COST actions ‘Transnational Family Dynamics in Europe’, ‘Making Young Researchers' Voices Heard for Gender Equality’ and ‘Connecting Theory and Practical Issues of Migration and Religious Diversity’.

Website

https://avesis.yildiz.edu.tr/fkayikci

Jeff MacSwan is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education at the University of Maryland. He is also Professor of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, and affiliate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Maryland Language Science Center. MacSwan’s research programme focuses on the linguistic study of bilingualism, codeswitching (or language alternation) and translanguaging theory, and implications for theories about the role of language in the education of multilingual students. 

MacSwan is the editor of the International Multilingual Research Journal and serves on several editorial boards. Examples of his work appear in American Educational Research Journal, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Lingua, Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, Teachers College Record, and in edited collections and handbooks. 

Jeff MacSwan is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and of the National Education Policy Center. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Bilingual Education Research Special Interest Group (SIG) and the Leadership through Scholarship Award from the AERA Second Language Research SIG, both in 2021. 

His recent books include Multilingual Perspectives on Translanguaging (Multilingual Matters, 2022) and Codeswitching in the Classroom: Critical Perspectives on Teaching, Learning, Policy, and Ideology (with Christian J. Faltis, Routledge, 2020).

Website

https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~macswan

Benjamin Marent is Associate Professor in Digital Technology at Work at the University of Sussex Business School, UK. His research investigates and informs the digital transformation of health care, with a current focus on telemedicine and the application of conversational artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies are surrounded by promising expectations to ensure the sustainability of care for the growing number of people with chronic conditions. As health sociologist, Benjamin Marent asks if and how “care” happens when communicative encounters between health professionals and their clients are mediated by technology (as in the case of telemedicine) or when the communicative other is no longer a human professional but an artificial agent (as in the case of conversational AI). 

Alongside this research, Benjamin Marent has co-edited the Sociology of Health & Illness special issue ‘Digital Health: Sociological Perspectives’ (2019) and is currently editing the De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society (forthcoming 2025) and the Sociology of Health & Illness special issue ‘Algorithms in Health and Medicine: Sociological Inquiries into Current Disruptions and Future Imaginaries’ (eds. Marent, Henwood, Petersen, Neves, forthcoming 2026). He serves on the editorial boards of the British Sociological Association's flagship journal Sociology and Sociology of Health & Illness, and he is an Associate Fellow of the Digital Future at Work Research Centre (‘Digit’).

Website

https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p498343-benjamin-marent/about

Uroš Matić is an archaeologist and Egyptologist based as a senior lecturer at the Institute for Ancient History and the Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Innsbruck, and the Institute for Classics at the University of Graz, Austria. His main expertise is in war and violence in ancient Egypt, ancient Egyptian interrelations, settlement archaeology, and gender studies in archaeology. 

Matić obtained his PhD from the University of Münster in 2017 and received two prizes for this work (Philippika prize of Harrassowitz in 2018 and Best Publication Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2020). He held a PRIME fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from 2018 to 2019 and received grants from the Foundation for Postgraduates of Egyptology in Vienna in 2016 and 2022. He was co-chair of the Archaeology and Gender in Europe (AGE) community of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) from 2016 to 2019. 

Uroš Matić taught at the University of Münster (Germany), University of Vienna (Austria), University of Graz (Austria), and University of Innsbruck (Austria). He has more than 100 publications, the most recent being the monograph Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt (Routledge, 2021) and the edited volumes Gender Trouble and Current Archaeological Debates (Springer, 2024 with Bisserka Gaydarska, Laura Coltofean and Marta Diaz-Guardamino) and Bodies that Mattered. Ancient Egyptian Corporealities (Sidestone Press, 2025, with Dina Serova).

Website

https://www.uibk.ac.at/alte-geschichte-orient/institut/team/dr.-uros-matic-ba-ma.html

Nico Orlandi is a philosopher of mind and of cognitive science. Their work draws on the history of philosophy and on contemporary research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and in computer science. Orlandi is currently working on a project on concepts – what they are and how we learn them – with a particular focus on concepts of social categories. In the past, Nico Orlandi’s research has focused on perception – what kind of capacity it is, what it presupposes, and what kind of relationship it affords with the environment. In their first monograph, Orlandi developed an anti-constructivist account of perception that contrasts with philosophical and psychological orthodoxy. 

Nico Orlandi received their PhD in 2007, and in 2011, while at Rice University, received a Phi Beta Kappa teaching award. Orlandi spent one year as a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (USA) in 2012 and was a visiting researcher at the Riken Laboratory for Perceptual Dynamics in Tokyo, Japan (2010), at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, France (2016), and at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy in London, Ontario, Canada (2019). Nico Orlandi is originally from Italy, was born in Siena and did their undergraduate studies in Florence. Orlandi is a first-generation academic.

Website

https://norlandi.sites.ucsc.edu

Mirzokhid Rakhimov currently serves as the head of department at the Contemporary History Center of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan as well as Adjunct Professor of the Webster University branch in Tashkent. In Uzbekistan he held different positions as director of the Contemporary History Center and chair of board directors of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences and was assigned as a visiting scholar to a number of universities, including the University of Cambridge and London University (UK), the Universities of Washington and Johns Hopkins (USA), Leiden University (Netherlands), the Universities of Gießen, Bielefeld and Passau (Germany), the Hokkaido and Tsukuba Universities (Japan), Nehru University (India), the Center for Russian, Caucasian and East European Studies (CNRS and EHESS; France), and the Universities of Shanghai and Lanzhou (China).

Mirzokhid Rakhimov’s research interests cover contemporary history as well as international and regional relations in Central Asia. He contributed to a broad range of publishers, amongst them Brill, Routledge, Springer, Elsevier, Peter Lang, Primus Books, Cuvillier publications as well as journals like Journal of Eurasian studies; Cambridge Journal of Eurasian studies; L` Europe en formation: Journal of Studies on European Integration and Federalism; Himalayan and Central Asian Studies and others. His books include Contemporary multilateral relations in Central Asia (Tashkent, 2020, in Russian); he also edited several books published in Germany, India, Russia, Republic of Korea, France and Uzbekistan, including Central Asia and European Union in search of sustainability (M. Rakhimov, G. Ismailova, A. Umarov (eds.), UWED, 2024) and Logistics and diplomacy in Central Asia (Y. Alix, K. Baizakova, J. Nicharapova, M. Rakhimov (eds.), Editions EMS, 2022). 

Mirzokhid Rakhimov is a member of the editorial board of international scientific journals: Journal of Eurasian Studies (Paris, Boston, London), Journal of Central Eurasia (Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow, Russia), and Kazakhstan journal of international studies (Astana, Kazakhstan).

Imran Sabir is Associate Professor at the School of Sociology, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. With a PhD in sociology from the University of Paris-Saclay, France, and over 15 years of academic experience, his research focuses on intergenerational relationships, social inequalities, and the sociology of knowledge.

Imran Sabir’s work bridges theoretical rigour with empirical depth, examining complex social phenomena through comparative frameworks, particularly between the Global North and South. As an applied practitioner of sociological methods, he translates theoretical frameworks into actionable solutions, deploying empirical evidence to contemporary social problems. As a public sociologist, Imran Sabir frequently writes for national newspapers, bringing sociological perspectives to public discourse on issues such as education reforms, urban planning, and social inequalities. He has contributed extensively to academic journals and has led multidisciplinary projects, including studies on road safety, solid waste management, and youth violence. His ongoing collaborative project investigates intergenerational support dynamics in ageing and non-ageing societies, offering insights into family structures, socioeconomic dependencies, and cultural norms. 

He is dedicated to the generation of impactful policy-relevant outcomes, and materialising meaningful academic exchanges for North-South cooperation. He envisions sociology as a dynamic, globally interconnected discipline, having a transformative role that connects scholarly inquiry with tangible societal advancements.

Website

https://soc.qau.edu.pk/faculty

Tannistha Samanta is a sociologist and an ageing studies scholar by training. She received her Master’s degree and PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Maryland College Park (USA). Her most active line of research is in the intersecting fields of health and ageing (with a focus on India) where she examines questions related to intergenerational relationships, social capital, consumer cultures, older adult sexualities, and theory development in ageing. In another line of inquiry, she examines the sexual and reproductive health of women through the intersecting lenses of the body and the market. Her research has been supported by several research grants and international fellowships including the United Nations Population Fund UNFPA (India); the School of Medicine of the University of California, San Diego (USA); and Global Liberal Arts Alliance (MI, USA). She was recently invited as a Mercator Fellow (summer 2024) by the University of Tübingen and Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. 

Tannistha Samanta is currently Associate Editor for the Journal of Aging Studies (Elsevier) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals The Sociological Review (SAGE) and Social Theory & Health (Palgrave Macmillan). From a political-intellectual standpoint, she remains committed to supporting and building an emerging community of young researchers from the Global South. She engages in a range of publics contributing by-lines to mainstream and alternative media outlets. Her op-eds and interviews have appeared in Forbes, Scroll.in and the BBC.

Achieving a nationally competitive scholarship, Barış Uslu visited the University of Sydney, Australia, for a year of research during his doctoral training. After this international visit, he received his PhD degree in the field of Educational Administration in 2015. Starting with his PhD research, Barış Uslu mainly studied higher education policy and management. While he was appointed to an assistant professorship in Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey, in 2018 as the Turkish team leader, he also joined an internationally comparative project titled ‘Academic Profession in the Knowledge-Based Society (APIKS)’ in which more than 20 countries participated. He then achieved his nation-wide tenure in Educational Sciences: Higher Education Studies from the Interuniversity Council of Turkey in 2019. 

Barış Uslu has published more than 100 articles, chapters and conference papers, and received different international and national project funds and prizes. In addition to his editorial or evaluator roles in various scientific platforms such as Higher Education Quarterly and the European Commission Co-Fund Programme, he continues his research on organisational management in universities, sustainable quality management in higher education, changes in academic profession, teacher education policies, digitalisation in education, and AI integration in higher education institutions.

Website

https://avesis.comu.edu.tr/barisuslu