Enis Bajra

Enis Bajra studied Political Science (B.A. & M.A.) at the University of Heidelberg. His main field of research is cybercrime with a focus on ransomware in the context of cybersecurity research. Since 2020, Enis has been working as a research assistant in various research projects, first “Sicherheit durch Verschleierung: Warum Regierungen Proxies in Cyberkonflikten einsetzen”, funded by the German Foundation of Peace Research (DSF), resulting in the cyber incident data set “Heidelberg Cyber Conflict Dataset (HD-CY.CON)”. Subsequently, Enis joined “European Repository of Cyber Incidents” as a team leader reviewing coding procedures of cyber incidents since 2022.

Alessia Colonnelli

Alessia Colonnelli received her B.A. and M.A. in Languages, History, and Cultures of Mediterranean and Islamic Countries from the University of Naples, L’Orientale. During her studies, she carried out some study stays in Morocco, hosted by the University of Fez and Agadir. These stays were helpful to guide Alessia’s research toward the field of Amazigh studies, to complement the reductive academic focus on the Arabic and Islamic cultural spheres when it comes to the study of the Maghrebi region. Along the same lines, her M.A. thesis on “Popular Protests in the Moroccan Rif: Movements and Strategies of Mobilization” allowed her to explore the role of Amazigh identity in contemporary Maghreb, from a historical and sociological point of view. 

In 2020, she received a post-graduate degree in International Cooperation and Development, from the University La Sapienza. During that time, Alessia collaborated with some organizations in the field of international collaboration, mainly focusing on human rights-related issues and migration policies. Since 2021, Alessia has collaborated with an Italian radio, hosting a program on media and information in Arabic and Islamic countries. In 2021, she started a collaboration within the research program Gathering the Dispersed at Heidelberg University, led by Prof. Dr. Johannes Becke. Her Ph.D. research focuses on the dynamics that characterized Amazigh identity activism by looking at the processes of enemization that characterized the context of the emergence of an amazing identity movement. The project sets out to highlight the role these processes played in influencing the strategies of early Amazigh activism and investigate how Amazigh activists interacted with the context of enemization to carve out spaces for action and promotion of Amazigh identity and culture.

Lars Dickmann

Lars Dickmann holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Sociology and a Master’s degree in European History in Global Perspective, both from the University of Basel. After graduating, he worked for a year as an assistant at the Chair for Early Modern History at the University of Basel. Before that, he was a student assistant in the SNSF project Printed Markets. The Basel Avisblatt 1729-1845 and wrote his Master’s thesis on Lost & Found advertisements as part of this project.

In his PhD project “Swiss Entomologists in the Dutch East Indies: Transnational Connections, Agronomic Engineering, and Plantation Science,” he looks at entomologists and their trajectories as proxy-imperial actors in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, as state agents, museologists, and biological engineers. By analysing the role of applied entomology in the control of insect infestations, his project examines how enmity between humans and insects was constructed.

Laura Gärtner

Laura Gärtner earned her B.A. in Applied Languages from Paris-Sorbonne University in 2018. After working for two years as a recruiting coordinator at a listed company in the Paris Region, she enrolled at Heidelberg University to complete a Master’s in Transcultural Studies. Literature and Language Contact in the Francophone Area with a specialization in French linguistics in 2022. Her Master’s thesis examined the representation of the Jew in French Telegram groups within a conspirationalist milieu. Laura’s main academic interests are computer-mediated communication, semantics, discourse analysis and the intersection between construction grammar and discourse. Prior to becoming a PhD candidate, she was adjunct lecturer at the seminar for Romance Languages in Heidelberg and student assistant at the chair for French, Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics. In her dissertation, Laura will be investigating the staging of enemies from a linguistic angle. She will thus carry out her doctoral project by detecting language structures that transmit enemy representations in an array of media sources from 21st-century Identitarian movements in France. By adopting a two-fold approach that includes French discourse analysis and construction grammar, Laura will explore syntactic structures in a large-scale, multi-media corpus. Her data set comprises of music, literature, essays, social media, and websites produced by self-declared Identitarian groups and individuals. By combining statistical corpus linguistic techniques with a qualitative analysis, she aims to show that cognitive representation units are expressed through recurrent language patterns that can be detected in discourse.

Primary Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sybille Große

Mariëlle Hesselink

Mariëlle Hesselink holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Amsterdam and earned her M.A. in Transcultural Studies from the University of Heidelberg. Within both these disciplines, she has been interested in the  interplay between conspiracy theory, religion, and the Internet, particularly through the lens of so-called “conflict entrepreneurs”. Her master dissertation explored the career of Janet Ossebaard, a Dutch crop circle researcher who later became influential within the QAnon conspiracy movement following her documentary series “Fall of the Cabal” (2019). 

Mariëlle’s PhD project examines Satanic Ritual Abuse conspiracy narratives purporting the existence of a vast, global network of evil satanists secretly abusing, sacrificing, and brainwashing children. Situated in the “Staging Enmity” research focus, her project aims to understand how these conspiratorial constructions of grandiosely evil enemies on the one hand, and deeply traumatized and overwhelmingly female victims on the other, are legitimized and delegitimized by various institutional authorities including therapists, law enforcement, and news media; how they find resonance in a broader cultic milieu and are made and remade through confluences with Christian, occult, and New Age discourses; and how they are transculturated through new circulation processes enabled by social media.  Primary supervisor: Prof. Dr. Joachim Kurtz

Anita Markmiller

In her dissertation project, Anita Markmiller explores the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in the early modern period from an art historical perspective. She is interested in how human contacts and conflicts with and on vast bodies of water, which can be both hostile and nurturing, have shaped artistic practices and how, in return, the circulation of such visual representations has affected people’s understanding of maritime spaces.

Anita Markmiller holds a B.A. in Art History, Film Studies and Psychology (University of Jena) and an M.A. in Art History and Transcultural Studies (Heidelberg University). During her studies, she worked as a student assistant and tutor for methods in art history as well as in various cultural and research institutions such as the Kunstsammlung Jena and the KHI in Florence, having gained professional experience in the fields of scientific research, cultural project management, curating, and art education. Her research interests lie in maritime painting of the 16th and 17th centuries as well as artistic creations from the 20th/21st centuries with a focus on ecology and materiality. In her MA thesis (2023) she examined the representation of the Roman goddess Venus in contemporary artworks made from plastic waste collected on the beach and their art historical, ecological, economic, and socio-political relations. Situated in the RTG’s focus “Knowing the enemy”, Markmiller concentrates on learning from and adapting to maritime environments. By delving into the processes that have shaped the artistic portrayal of such human experiences, her research contributes to both the study of cultural and ecological aspects within the field of ocean studies and to an understanding of enmity in human-nature relations. Her thesis is being supervised by Prof. Dr Monica Juneja.

Paula Simon

Paula received her B.A. in History and English Studies from the University of Heidelberg. During her undergraduate studies, she spent a semester abroad at the University of Birmingham, UK and at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. She graduated with distinction from the University of Heidelberg with a M.A. in Global History. Her thesis focused on the national socialist genocide of Roma in Niš, Serbia. In 2022, she began writing her doctoral thesis as a Romani Rose fellow at the Research Center Antigypsyism in Heidelberg and has been a fellow of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes since 2023. She is part of the research team “Yugoslavia” of the “Encyclopaedia of the Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe”.

Her research interests include minority history, historical Antigypsyism research, the history of the Second World War and the Roma Genocide in Yugoslavia.

Her PhD project examines the relationship between Serbian Roma and dominant society in the interwar-period and under national socialist occupation and aims at analysing Antigypsyism as one example of ambivalent enmity. It sets out to investigate how Serbian society developed ambivalent discourses on the minority, discursively rendering them inner-societal strangers of the nation-building project while integrating them into civil and religious structures of the newly emerging state. Situated primarily in the research field “Knowing the Enemy”, the project examines ambivalences arising from knowledge production in contexts of conflictual transculturation. To explore the relationality and processuality of the relationship between Roma and Serbian dominant society, the project traces how local knowledge about Roma changed in response to Romani emancipation, self-organization, and assimilation into Yugoslav culture during the interwar period. The project aims to highlight similarities and peculiarities of the Yugoslavian case compared to Western European discourses and developments. It traces the transfer of antigypsyist knowledge to Yugoslav academic circles and society, situating the case within discourses of Othering and racialization of the time. By including the period of National-socialist occupation and the persecution and genocide of Roma, the project aims at examining how local perceptions of Roma were altered in contact with the occupier’s racialized images of “Gypsies” as internal enemies and with practices of discrimination and persecution.

Primary supervisor: Prof. Dr. Tanja Penter

Publications: Paula Simon, „Damals rettete ich meinen Sohn, indem ich ihn unter Kissen versteckte…“ Handlungsspielräume unter deutscher Besatzung, Selbstzeugnisse revisited, 11.12.2023.

Masato Tanaka

In his doctoral project, Masato Tanaka will explore the formation and reformulation of sectarian antagonism in late Ottoman and French Mandate Lebanon. The project approaches this topic from the socio-economic perspective, focusing on the rising middle class of this period. Through the lens of the cosmopolitan class of economic professionals, the project seeks to highlight how the emergence and remaking of sectarian violence is deeply connected to the long-term transformation of the political economy in the region within the context of Ottoman imperial reform and French colonialism.

Before joining the RTG, he worked in various archives and libraries in Lebanon, France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. He earned B.A. in Oriental History (2018) and M.A. in Asian History (2020) and completed doctoral coursework in the Department of Asian Studies (2023) at the University of Tokyo. Throughout his studies, he spent one academic year abroad for Arabic language study at An-Najah National University and another academic year for a research stay at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the American University of Beirut. His research interests have focused on the socio-economic transformation in the Levant during the long nineteenth century.

Muhammad Usman

Muhammad Usman holds a B.A in Philosophy (University of Punjab), M.A in Philosophy with Gold Medal (University of Punjab) and Second M.A in Islamic Thought and Civilization on Merit Scholarship (University of Management and Technology, Lahore). Additionally, he earned two-year postgraduate Diploma in ‘Advancing Scientific And Theological Literacy’ from the University of Norte Dame, Indiana, USA (2019-2021) and worked with them as Student Coordinator and Teacher. He has experience of five years in teaching (Philosophy, Religious Studies and Social Studies) and served by way of Lecturer in the University of Central Punjab (2016-2021). He enrolled as PhD candidate in the University of Erfurt (2021) and worked as Research Assistant in the department of Philosophy (2021). He was awarded a prestigious scholarship DAAD (September 2021-2022) for PhD. He also worked as per Research Assistant and Translator in Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt (Feb-July 2023). Since October of 2023, he joined the RTG (Ambivalent Enmity) as PhD candidate.

In his project, Muhammad Usman will explore the indigenous masculine formations, religious aspiration and national cosmology in the retreat ceremony at Wagah border situated between Lahore from Pakistani side and Amritsar from Indian side. The respective project focuses on the construction of enmity by certain actors and how it is perpetuated and staged through the choreography performed by Pakistan Rangers and their Indian counterparts.

The discursive dance of reason and indigenous choreography of emotions collaborate with each other in the space of Wagah. The conceptualization of Wagah as an ambivalent space translates that it has very oxymoronic nature of inclusivity and exclusivity. This project will contribute to establish that Wagah is both Bazm and Razm in local dictum simultaneously. This project will provide a means to test the hypothesis that enmity must be understood as a processual, relational, and deeply ambivalent category.

Primary Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Hans Harder

Filippo Vaccaro

Filippo Vaccaro earned his B.A. degree (December 2019) and M.A. degree (July 2021) from Sapienza University of Rome. His bachelor’s thesis focused on Byzantine history, specificallly on Basil I, the founder of the Macedonian dynasty. His mater’s thesis explored the relationship between the Venetian Senate and administrative councils in Crete in the mid-14th century. In the academic year 2020/2021, he participated in the Holy Sepulchre Workshop, preparing for an archaeological excavation led by the Department of Science of Antiquities at Sapienza, starting in 2022. His responsibilities included the study of Medieval Latin and Greek sources from the 4th to the 12th century. His research interests ecompass the History of the Medieval Mediterranean, Venice in the Late Middle Ages, Maritime History, and the relations between the Byzantine East and the Latin West.

Since November 2021, he has been a doctoral student at Sapienza University of Rome (in cotutelle with Universität Heidelberg), with a research project on Venetian society in Crete in the 14th century. In pursuit of the objectives of the RTG, Filippo Vaccaro will examine the relationships on the island between the Venetians and the local Greek component, highlighting the peculiarities on enmity in a frontier context: an ambivalent space where identities become more pronounced, yet where there is room for experiences of cultural and religious hybridization, leading to a loosening of the sense of belonging to the motherland for those who had arrived there.

Primary Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Nikolas Jaspert

Tom Würdemann

Tom Khaled Würdemann has an MA degree in Global History and a BA In history and sociology from Heidelberg University. He has teaching experience both at the university as an adjunct lecturer and in political education to future policemen and women at a police academy. Before enrolling in “Ambivalent Enmity”, he worked for the research projects “Beyond Conflict and Coexistence” and “Gathering the Dispersed” at Heidelberg University and the Center for Jewish Studies Heidelberg. He has six years of experience working in education, specifically in the field of combating racism, antisemitism, and other forms of extremism for students and schoolteachers. He has conducted research in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, and Iraqi Kurdistan. His doctoral project deals with the perspective of Palestinian intellectuals towards Zionism and the state of Israel. More specifically, how their perspective has changed in relation to time and events such as recurring conflict or the peace process. His case study is the oldest Palestinian research institution, The “Institute for Palestine Studies” in Beirut, Jerusalem, and Washington DC.

Guanghou Zhou

Guanghou Zhou studied Psychology (B.Sc.) at the university of Heidelberg and received his M.Sc. in psychology from university of Frankfurt. Since 2021, he has been participating in postgraduate psychotherapy training at the university hospital of Heidelberg.

In his college studies, he cultivated an interest in social cognition and social interaction. His master’s thesis centered on identifying and evaluating various dimensions of altruistic behaviors and motivations among Chinese individuals, and whether systematic differences exist between them and their German counterparts. His investigation revealed a predilection for reciprocity among Chinese individuals as a means to maintain norms in cooperation/competition, whereas German individuals displayed a preference for moral conviction to achieve the same end.

His PhD project focuses on the stage of enemy contact. Its aim is to study immigrants’ susceptibility to enmity during the acculturational process. Drawing on Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) and System Justification Theory (Jost &Banaji, 1994), he aims to elucidate the psychological mechanism of how immigrants, as minority group, internalize group-based enmity, including stereotypes and prejudices, and moreover, how this process is related with self-identity and self-pathology.  Further, experimental approaches would be employed to better understand the dynamics between collaboration and competition among adversaries.