Current Projects

The project examines how President Trump's questioning of American security guarantees affects German foreign Policy preferences, defense spending, and transatlantic relations. It seeks seed funding to conduct a pilot study and hold a workshop to discuss the pilot result and prepare a funding application for a larger project.

The project expands the research agenda on transatlantic relations beyond its core traditionally defined through state policies and bilateral interactions. More specifically, recognizing their importance for global order, it intends to unpack transatlantic relations conceptually and empirically by looking at their different layers. Thereby, the projects aims at creating a larger research community which comes together at two different workshops and secures long-term funding by a third party.

The project examines how 'exclusionary speech' – which encompasses slurs, name-calling, and verbal prohibitions against whole social groups in various contexts – shifts social norms and public discourse. It addresses this question from a multidisciplinary perspective, bringing together linguistic, social epistemologists, and philosophers for a collaborative, research-based workshop, followed by a policy-oriented public forum.

The interdisciplinary, transatlantic project latches onto the notion of mobilizing "the Archive" in/for a de/colonized present with regard to the scholar as archon in contemporaneous academic and museal endeavours of mobilizing archives and curating pasts-imperial, post-colonial, and post-socialist contexts in Germany and the United States.

This project compares anti-Islamist sentiment in Germany and the US. Aiming to decipher whether the drivers of anti-Islamism are the same on both sides of the Atlantic, it plans to conduct an original survey that taps into the constituents of why citizens adopt Islam-critical attitudes.

The project joins scholars trained in political science, comparative historical (and cultural) sociology, North American Studies, and political theory in order to offer a theoretical redescription of the "contemporary crisis of democracy" centered on recent experiences in the United States and Federal Republic of Germany.