The Research Training Group began its work on 1st October 2023 with two Postdoctoral Research Fellows, 12 Doctoral Research Fellows, 11 Principal Investigators and our Coordination Team.
Speakers
Prof. Dr. Tanja Penter
Speaker Tanja Penter is a specialist of Eastern European history and has devoted her research to experiences of violence, enmity, and dictatorship in twentieth-century Ukraine and Russia. She has studied the development of antagonistic relationships between Ukrainians and Russians at different times: the revolution of 1917, World War II and the German occupation, and following the end of the Soviet Union, focusing on transcultural entanglements as well as continuities and changes in the dynamics of the conflict. She has experience as a mentor for female early career scholars within the framework of various mentoring programs.
Prof. Dr. Johannes Becke
Johannes Becke has explored the dynamics of antagonism and exceptionalism in Arab-Israeli relations, both in terms of state behavior (expansionist foreign policies) and knowledge production (Israel Studies in the Arab world). His current research seeks to integrate Arab-Israeli relations into a broader history of Muslim-Jewish ties, with a focus on transcultural processes such as ambivalent representations of the other and mutual learning.
Prof. Dr. Joachim Kurtz
Joachim Kurtz has explored the anxieties and interests that fuel East Asian discourses of self-assertion in his research and teaching, highlighting the transcultural nature of even the most ferociously nativist rhetoric in politics, philosophy and other fields. More recently, he has begun to investigate the ways in which Confucian revivalists in Mainland China borrow Protestant and orthodox Christian as well as Islamic fundamentalist tropes to reject global modernity and oppose its cosmopolitan propagators.
Prof. Dr. Svenja Taubner
Svenja Taubner’s research focuses on psychological theories and the treatment and prevention of violence in adolescence and parenthood within the framework of mentalization, neuroscience, and attachment research. She has developed a coding system for the quality of reflective functioning in interview transcripts that can be applied to other narratives, e.g., diaries and other ego-documents.
Coordination
Silke Engelhardt
Our coordinator Silke Engelhardt has a M.A. in Medieval Studies. She has worked on corpus of church foundation and/or consecration/dedication charters compiled and edited by Ramon Orteig i Mata with which she wanted to show the range of agency of medieval women within the context of church foundations and/or consecrations/ dedications. She is currently researching for her PhD about the veneration of saints and their cults in early medieval Catalunya and Septimania. Now she is coordinating the RTG. At the same time she is coordinating the Heidelberg Research Laboratory Ancient Near East.
Ambivalent Enmity 