Notes on Contributors

Doris Bachmann-Medick is Senior Research Fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) of the Justus Liebig University Giessen. She held numerous appointments as a Visiting Professor, recently at the universities of Graz, Göttingen, UC Irvine, Cincinnati, and Georgetown University. Her main fields of research are cultural theory, Kulturwissenschaften, literary anthropology, and translation studies. Her recent book publications include Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (6th ed. Rowohlt, 2018 [2006]), revised English edition Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture (De Gruyter, 2016), and her edited volumes “The Translational Turn” (special issue of the journal Translation Studies, 2009) and The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective (De Gruyter, 2014). She serves on the Editorial Board of Translation Studies (since 2008).

Christine Bischoff is Research Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hamburg. Her research and teaching encompass the following areas: theories and methods of visual anthropology, media theory and media communication, migration research, post-colonial studies, ethnographic research on religiosity and spirituality (especially conversion research), and qualitative methods in cultural studies. Her recent book publications include Blickregime der Migration. Images und Imaginationen des Fremden in Schweizer Printmedien (Waxmann, 2016), Images of Illegalized Immigration: Towards a Critical Iconology of Politics (transcript, 2010), and Methoden der Kulturanthropologie (UTB, 2014). She is currently a scholar at the Isa Lohmann-Siems Foundation and preparing a conference and publication on Confessions: Forms and Formulas. Her habilitation project is about Religious Mobility: Conversion as a Social and Cultural Resonating Space.

Friederike Eigler is Professor of German at Georgetown University and has widely published on 20th- and 21st-century literature and culture with special foci on memory, space/place, and gender. She was Editor of The German Quarterly from 2004 to 2006 and she is the author of Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende (Schmidt, 2005). Recent publications include the volume Heimat: At the Intersection of Memory and Space (De Gruyter, 2012), which she co-edited with Jens Kugele, a special issue of German Politics and Society on “German-Polish Border Regions in Literature and Film” (2013) co-edited with Astrid Weigert, and a monograph titled Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion (Camden House, 2014). One of Eigler’s current research projects looks at the responses of literature and theater to the influx of refugees into Europe.

Heidrun Friese is an anthropologist and Professor of Intercultural Communication at Chemnitz Technical University. She held numerous appointments as Researcher and Visiting Professor at, for instance, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, the Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant’Anna di Pisa, the European University Institute, Florence, and the institute HyperWerk at Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Basel. Her research interests focus on social and political theory, (cultural) identities, borders and transnational practices, hospitality and undocumented mobility (Mediterranean), and digital anthropology. Publications include Flüchtlinge: Opfer – Bedrohung – Helden. Zur politischen Imagination des Fremden (transcript, 2017), Grenzen der Gastfreundschaft. Die Bootsflüchtlinge von Lampedusa und die europäische Frage (transcript, 2014). She serves on the Editorial Board for the European Journal of Social Theory and Time and Society.

Heike Greschke is Professor of Sociology with a focus on Comparative Cultural Studies and Qualitative Research at the Technische Universität Dresden, where she also serves as Chairperson of the Executive Committee of the Centre for Integration Research. Prior to that, she was Junior Professor of Sociology with a focus on Media Sociology at Justus Liebig University Giessen. From 2015–2017 she lead the research project “The Mediatization of Parent-Child-Relationships in Transnational Migration” funded by the DFG-Priority Program 1505 “Mediatized Worlds.” Since 2018 she is Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Research Center (Sonder-forschungsbereich) 1285 “Invectivity: Constellations and Dynamics of Disparagement,” leading the subproject “Invektive Kodierungen von Interkulturalität. Ethnografische Situationsanalysen in interkulturellen Trainings- und Integrationskursen.” Her main interests in research and teaching are related to migration, media, family, globalization and culture, and methodological issues of cultural studies. Her recent publications in English include the monograph Is There a Home in Cyberspace? The Internet in Migrants’ Everyday Life and the Emergence of Global Communities (Routledge, 2012, reprinted as paperback in 2014) and the edited volume Grounding Global Climate Change: Contributions from the Social and Cultural Sciences (Springer, 2015, with Julia Tischler).

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is Professor of Sociology at Justus Liebig University Giessen. Previous to her appointment in Giessen she was a Senior Lecturer in Transcultural Studies in the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies Department at the University of Manchester, UK, and an Assistant Professor (wissenschaftliche Assistentin) in Sociology in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Hamburg. Her teaching and research engages with questions of global inequalities and their local articulation particularly in Germany, Spain, and the UK. She is interested in (post)Marxist and decolonial perspectives on feminist and queer epistemology and their application to the field of migration, labor, and culture. This is particularly reflected in her monograph Migration, Domestic Work and Affect (2010) and the co-edited collection Decolonizing European Sociology (2010, with Manuela Boatcã and Sérgio Costa). Some of her recent publications are the co-edited volume Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations (Liverpool University Press, 2015, with Shirley Anne Tate), “Sensing Dispossession: Women and Gender Studies Between Institutional Racism and Migration Control Policies in the Neoliberal University” (Women’s Studies International Forum, 2016), “Affektive Materialität. Transversale Trauer und darstellbare Gerechtigkeit,” Verantwortung und Un/Verfügbarkeit, ed. Corinna Bath et al. (Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2017).

Sabine Hess is Professor at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, University of Göttingen. Her main areas of research and teaching are migration and border regime studies, anthropology of globalization and transnationalism, anthropology of policy and Europeanization, gender studies, and anthropological methodologies. She was the scientific curator of several interdisciplinary research and exhibition projects on the history of immigration to Germany and director of several research projects on the European border regime funded by national and European research foundations. She is co-founder of the interdisciplinary European-wide “Network for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies” (kritnet) and member of the German-wide “Rat für Migration” (Council for Migration) as well as a Board Member of the Göttingen Center for Gender Studies. Her recent publications in the field of border and migration in English are: “Turkey’s Changing Migration Regime and its Global and Regional Dynamics” (co-edited issue of Movements: Journal for Critical Border and Migration Regime Research, 2017), “Tracing the Effects of the EU-Turkey Deal: The Momentum of the Multi-Layered Turkish Border Regime” (with Gerda Heck, Movements: Turkey’s Changing Migration Regime within Global and Regional Dynamics, 2017), and “Under Control? Or: Border (as) Conflict!” (with Bernd Kasparek, Social Inclusion, 2017).

Wulf Kansteiner is Professor of History at Aarhus University. He is a cultural historian, historical theorist, and memory studies scholar. His research focuses on collective memories of Nazism and the Holocaust in film, television, and digital culture, the narrative structures of historical writing, and the methods and theories of memory studies. He is the author of In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Ohio University Press, 2006), co-editor of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Duke University Press, 2006), “Historical Representation and Historical Truth” (Theme Issue of History & Theory 47, 2009), Den Holocaust erzählen. Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrativer Kreativität (Wall-stein, 2013), and Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016). He is also co-founder and co-editor of the Sage-Journal Memory Studies (since 2008).

Evangelos Karagiannis is Senior Assistant at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna. He has held positions at the University of Zurich, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and the University of Osnabrück and has participated in numerous research projects. His research interests encompass issues of nationalism and minorities, modernity and secularism, globalization, and migration. He has published a monograph on the Pomak minority in post-socialist Bulgaria and is currently working on a project on the tension between globalism and nationalism in Greek Pentecostalism.

Kader Konuk is Professor and Chair of Turkish Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. She is the Director of the newly founded Academy in Exile, located in Berlin and Essen. Between 2001 and 2013 she was Assistant and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at the University of Michigan. Trained as a comparatist in German, Turkish, and English literature, Konuk focuses on the disciplinary nexus between literary criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history. Her research is situated at the intersections between religious and ethnic communities, beginning with the Ottoman modernization reforms and continuing on to Turkish-German relations in the 21st century. Her work examines cultural practices that evolve in the context of East-West relations (travel, migration, and exile). In her monograph East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford UP, 2010), she investigates the relationship between German-Jewish exile and the modernization of the humanities in Turkey. In her current book project, Konuk questions the common equation of secularism with Western modernity and is interested in the connection between religious critique, the freedom of speech, and literary discourses in the history of republican Turkey.

Jens Kugele is Head of Research Coordination at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) of the Justus Liebig University Giessen. He is one of the research center’s Principal Investigators and has been a member of the center’s Executive Board since 2014. Previously, he held appointments as Visiting Researcher and Assistant Professor at the LMU Munich, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University, and the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell University. His research interests include intersections of literary and cultural history with the history of religion; German-Jewish literature and culture; constructions of belonging, memory, and space. Recent publications include the volume Heimat: At the Intersection of Memory and Space (De Gruyter, 2012), which he co-edited with Friederike Eigler, and a special issue of the Journal of Religion in Europe on “Relocating Religion(s)” in museal spaces (Brill, 2011), which he co-edited with Katharina Wilkens. One of Kugele’s current research projects looks at “sacred space” as a concept for the interdisciplinary study of culture. He is co-founder and co-editor of the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary open access journal On_Culture.

Paul Mecheril is Professor for Migration and Education at the Department for Pedagogy of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. He is Head of the Center for Migration, Education and Cultural Studies. Prior to that, he was Professor for Intercultural Education and Social Change at the University of Innsbruck. His main research areas include migration and pedagogy, racism, and cultural studies. He is the (co-)author of nine and (co-)editor of 26 books. He recently edited Handbuch Migrationspädagogik (Beltz, 2016), co-edited Dämonisierung der Anderen. Rassismuskritik der Gegenwart (transcript, 2016, with María do Mar Castro Varela), and Resistance. Subjects, Representations, Contexts (transcript, 2017, with Martin Butler and Lea Brenningmeyer).

Charlton Payne is DAAD P.R.I.M.E. Fellow in the Literature Department at the University of Erfurt in Germany and a Visiting Researcher in the German Department at UC Berkeley. He has published essays on epic narration and cosmopolitanism in the works of Goethe and Wieland, Kleist and the problem of asylum, the representation of passports and statelessness in 20th-century literature, archiving displacement in postwar Germany, and refugee legibility and the traces of the (in)human in contemporary literature. His book-length publications include The Epic Imaginary: Political Power and Its Legitimations in Eighteenth-Century German Literature (De Gruyter, 2012) as well as the edited volumes Kant and the Concept of Community (Rochester, 2011), Niemandsbuchten und Schutzbefohlene. Flucht-Räume und Flüchtlingsfiguren in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (V & R, 2017), and, with Jesper Gulddal, a special issue on “Passports” for the journal symplokē (2017). He is completing a book on the relationship between fiction and documental identity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Shalini Randeria is Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, as well as the Director of the Hirschman Centre on Democracy. Before joining the IHEID she was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich, as well as Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Central European University Budapest. She has published widely on the anthropology of globalization, law, the state, and social movements. Her empirical research on India addresses issues of post-coloniality and multiple modernities. Recent edited volumes include: Migration and Borders of Citizenship (with Ravi Palat, special issue of Refugee Watch: A South Asian Journal on Forced Migration, 2017), Politics of the Urban Poor (with Veena Das, special issue of Current Anthropology, 2015), Anthropology, Now and Next: Diversity, Connections, Confrontations, Reflexivity. Essays in Honour of Ulf Hannerz (with Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Christina Garsten, Berghahn Publishers, 2014), and Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (with Sebastian Conrad und Regina Römhild, 2nd edition, Campus Verlag, 2013).

Werner Schiffauer is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Social and Cultural Anthropology at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). His main fields of interest are anthropology of migration, the organization of societal heterogeneity, Islam in Europe, and anthropology of the state. He has published several books, among them Parallelgesellschaften. Wieviel Wertekonsens braucht unsere Gesellschaft? Ethnographische Überlegungen (transcript, 2008), Nach dem Islamismus. Die Islamische Gemeinde Milli Görüş. Eine Ethnographie (Suhrkamp, 2010), and Schule, Moschee, Elternhaus. Eine ethnologische Intervention (Suhrkamp, 2015).