Former Staff
Amelie Hartschuh
Secretary's Office
Amelie Hartschuh studied French, Spanish and Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. After her studies she worked in an artist-management-agency as an assistant to the management director, as well as in the department of public relations, cultural administration and event management. Since October 2013, she is re:work’s secretary.
At the same time she has been working as a dance instructor for salsa and Latin-American dances.
Dr. Felicitas Hentschke
Program Manager
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 702 06
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 702 10
felicitas.hentschke(at)asa.hu-berlin.de
received her doctorate from the postgraduate program “Democracy in the USA” at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (Free University Berlin) on the subject of American plans for the democratization of Japan and Germany after the Second World War. She then worked as a research assistant at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum). As project head of the interdisciplinary research group “Paths to Knowledge: Transregional Studies” at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Institute for Advanced Study), she was instrumental in preparing the groundwork for IGK. In terms of scholarly work, she is presently looking into the lives of workers in the mining industry in the French province of Lorraine.
Publications
with James Williams, eds. To Be at Home. House, Work, and Self in the Modern World. München: De Gruyter Verlag Oldenbourg 2018.(Work in Global and Historical Perspective, Vol. 5).
Demokratisierung als Ziel der amerikanischen Besatzungspolitik in Deutschland und Japan, 1943–1947. Münster: Lit 2001. (Studien zu Geschichte, Politik und Gesellschaft Nordamerikas 16).
Hentschke, Felicitas & Braig, Marianne „Die Zukunft der Area Studies in Deutschland“. In: Afrika Spectrum 40.3 (2005), 547–558.
[Tagungsbericht] „Area Studies Revisited. Transregional Studies in Germany“. In: H-Soz-u-Kult Februar 2009.
(http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=2625)
Last updated: January 15, 2019
Dr. Maïté Kersaint
Fellow Services
studied business administration at the European School of Business Reutlingen and the Reims Management School as well as international relations at King’s College London. She received a PhD with a dissertation on digital public diplomacy from the European-University Viadrina.
Ming-Han Lee
IT Services Coordinator
is born and raised in Taipei, where he is selected for the gifted education program and completes his B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. After serving the compulsory military service as a telecommunication officer, he relocates to Berlin and receives his M.A. for a double major in Education and Computer Science at Humboldt University. His academic research on the use of information and communications technology in the education sector paves the way for his professional interests in both eLearning and User Experience design. He is a former DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and DFG (German Research Foundation) scholarship recipient.
Ming-Han works as web developer, IT consultant, research assistant before joining the re:work team.
Sebastian Marggraff
Programme Assistant
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 702 03
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 702 10
sebastian.marggraff(at)asa.hu-berlin.de
Constanze Röderstein
Financial Manager
is a hotel management expert and personnel-management assistant. She has worked as a business-management employee in large hotels and in film production, and as a board-of-directors secretary. She also served as honorary judge for the industrial tribunal in Frankfurt am Main. At the International Research Center she is responsible for budgeting and personnel.
Dr. Jürgen Schmidt
Research Associate
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 702 19
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 702 10
studied history, political science and German studies in Heidelberg, Innsbruck and Berlin (Free University). He received his doctorate for a work on the relationship between the working and middle classes in Imperial Germany, using the Prussian city of Erfurt as his case-study. Before he took up his work as a research assistant at the International Research Center, he worked at the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung, at the Ruhr University in Bochum, at the archive of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and in a variety of research projects.
Since being at the Research Center, Jürgen Schmidt has been finishing up a book on the early history of the labor movement in the nineteenth century, the subject now being newly positioned and accented as well as analyzed from fresh angles. This is done by virtue of a three-pronged inquiry: How did the workers movement impact its members’ understanding of work? To what degree can we interpret the early labor movement as a generational phenomenon and explain it by means of (work) experiences that were life-phase specific? In what ways is it possible, useful, and even necessary – and this in opposition to hitherto dominant views of the matter – to understand the emerging labor movement of a country (for instance Germany) as being part of and a moment in transnational processes?
Publications
Brüder, Bürger und Genossen. Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung zwischen Klassenkampf und Bürgergesellschaft 1830-1870. Bonn: Dietz, 2018.
Arbeiter in der Moderne. Arbeitsbedingungen, Lebenswelten, Organisationen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015.
‘Public Services in Erfurt and Frankfurt am Main Compared (c. 1890–1914). Capabilities in Prussia?’ Urban History 41, no. 2 (2014): 247–64.
August Bebel. Kaiser der Arbeiter. Eine Biografie. Zürich: Rotpunktverlag, 2013.
‘Zivilgesellschaft, sozioökonomische Spannungslinien und sozialmoralisches Milieu – Arbeiterbewegung und Arbeiterparteien in Deutschland von 1860 bis 1914’. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 53 (2013): 19–46.
‘”Die Republik mit dem Sternenbanner hat keine Bürger zweiter Klasse". Wilhelm Liebknechts USA-Reise im transnationalen Kontext”. In „Am Sternenbanner das Geschick der Arbeiterklasse“. 150 Jahre Beziehungen zwischen deutscher Sozialdemokratie und den USA, edited by Werner Kremp and Michael Schneider. Trier: WVT, 2013: 41–65.
‘Feierabend statt Ruhestand? Über die Bedeutung des Ruhestandes in der Arbeiterschaft und in der Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland um 1900’. Edited by Josef Ehmer. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichte [=Themenheft Ruhestand] 22, no. 3 (2011): 55–80.
‘Local labour relations as starting point for global perspectives? The case of Erfurt’s trade unions, c. 1890-1914’. In: Rethinking Work: Global Historical and Sociological Perspectives, edited by Rana Behal, Babacar Fall and Alice Mah. New Delhi: Tulika, 2011: 155-169.
‘Labor Movements/Labor Unions’. In: International Encyclopedia of Civil Society, edited by Helmut K. Anheier and Stefan Toepler New York, NY: Springer, 2010: 920-924.
‘The Early German Labour Movement as Representative of Civil Society. Participation, Emancipation and Learning Democracy in 19th Century Germany, 1848 – 1880’. In Building Civil Society and Democracy in New Europe, edited by Sven Eliaeson. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008: 293–315.
Zivilgesellschaft. Bürgerschaftliches Engagement von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Texte und Kommentare, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2007.
Begrenzte Spielräume. Eine Beziehungsgeschichte von Arbeiterschaft und Bürgertum am Beispiel Erfurts, 1870 bis 1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005.
‘‚Die Arbeitsleute Sind Im Allgemeinen Gesünder […] Als Die Herrschaften‘. Krankheitserfahrungen Und Männlichkeit in Arbeiterautobiographien, 1870–1914’. Medizin, Gesellschaft Und Geschichte 24 (2005): 105–27.
Last updated: November 16, 2018
Dr. Julia Tischler
Research Associate
completed her doctorate in 2011 at the University of Cologne, on the Kariba Dam in the Central African Federation. The Kariba Dam is a large construction project located on the borders of what is now Zambia and Zimbabwe. Julia Tischler used the dam as the basis for a case study to investigate various development and state-building concepts and policies during the late colonial period. She has travelled to the UK, Zambia and Malawi to undertake archival research and conduct interviews with people who lived through the corresponding period.
The dissertation was honoured with the Hedwig Hintze Award of the Association of German Historians (VHD) in September 2012. Every two years, this award is bestowed upon an outstanding dissertation in the field of history.
Before joining the research staff at the IGK in March 2012, Julia Tischler led the Junior Research Group “Klima Welten” at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) at the University of Bielefeld, and helped coordinate the Bielefeld Cluster of Excellence application in sociology and history.
At re:work, Julia Tischler is currently working on a new project on the relationships between agrarian work and agricultural education in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. Her study looks at South Africa’s ‘agricultural revolution’ (c. 1910-40) from the perspective of knowledge and formal education. The different educational services emerging at the time (agricultural colleges, extension services, journals etc.) are analyzed as a form of social-ecological engineering by which state actors tried to navigate through structural change and the perceived crisis of poverty and the rural exodus. The study investigates into the increasing state intervention in rural lifeworlds at the time as well as the responses of the addressees, comparing the Afrikaans-dominated Orange Free State and the African reserves of the Ciskei and Transkei. A core question concerns the role agriculturists – men, women, ‘Europeans’, and ‘Africans’ – were meant to play in the emerging nation of South Africa. At the same time, the study adopts an ‘entangled’ perspective, as South Africans developed educational services in exchange with experts from other countries, foremost from the USA. An overarching question of the study is whether the South African case provides theoretical insights about the significance of agricultural knowledge and work in settler colonialism that could also be applied more generally.
Publications
Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation. The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies). Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke/New York 2013.
Grounding Global Climate Change. Contributions from the Social and Cultural Sciences (Hrsg. zusammen mit Heike Greschke). Springer: Dordrecht 2014.
“Negotiating Development: The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation”, in: Bloom, P., Manuh, T. & S. Miescher (Hrsg.) Modernization as Spectacle in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2014, 159-183.
“Cementing Uneven Development: The Central African Federation and the Kariba Dam Scheme”, Journal of Southern African Studies 40/4 (2014), 1047-1064.
Whose power? Energie und Entwicklung in der Spätkolonialzeit am Beispiel des Kariba-Staudamms in der Zentralafrikanischen Föderation. In: Bauch, M. & B. Förster (Hrsg.) Historische Zeitschrift, Beiheft 63, „Wasserinfrastrukturen und Macht“ 2014, 266-286.
Resisting modernisation? Two African responses to the Kariba Dam scheme in the Central African Federation. Comparativ 21/1 (2011), 60-75.
Smaran Dayal
Student Assistant, IT
After earning a B.A. in English and American studies and cultural anthropology at the University of Freiburg, Smaran Dayal is now pursuing an M.A. in anglophone literary and cultural studies at the University of Potsdam. His research foci are postcolonial literary criticism and critical race and ethnic studies. His B.A. thesis, “‘Back-to-Bom!’: Urban cosmopolitanism and naming in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” won the 2013 Graduate Award (complimentary prize) from ASNEL, the Germanophone Postcolonial Studies association.
Felix Fuhg
Student Assistant
Following a BA in history and philosophy, Felix Fuhg is now enrolled on the ‘history of the 19th and 20th century’ master’s programme at the Free University of Berlin. As part of his focus on global history, he is mainly concerned with the networking that took place between anti-colonial movements in the 1920s.
Daniela Greca
Student Assistant
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 702 00
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 702 10
Lucian Heinzmann
Student Assistant
Julia Hoppe
Student Assistant
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 702 38
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 702 10
julia.hoppe(at)asa.hu-berlin.de
After completing a B.A. in Italian studies with Law, History and Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Bologna, Julia Hoppe is currently a student of East European Studies (M.A.) at the Universität Potsdam. She focuses on Poland.
Marieke Kelm
Student Assistant
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 702 37
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 702 10
Lilly Kempf
Fellow Services
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 702 08
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 702 10
Rafaela Kuchenmeister
Student Assistant
Stephanie Lämmert
Student Assistant
In 2011-12, Stephanie Lämmert taught Swahili as well as a seminar in African History at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. Since September 2012, she has been writing her PhD thesis on "Colonial court culture. Peasant litigation in Shambaa 'native courts' in colonial Tanganyika” at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. Andreas Eckert is her external thesis supervisor.
Josefine Langer
Student Assistant
Josefine Langer is currently pursuing a BA in history and area studies (Asia / Africa) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has been learning Arabic and deepening her interest in the Arabic speaking world since 2012. She is particularly interested in the topics of work and gender.
Norman Leymann
Student Assistant, IT
Since graduating from university with a degree in area studies Asia/Africa, Norman Leymann has been working as a freelance web developer and artist in several projects in Berlin and Brandenburg.
Maruan Mourad
Student Assistant / re:lax massage
is business economist and was studying regional studies (Asia and Africa), with the emphasis on Japan, at the Humboldt University Berlin. Currently he recieves training to become an alternative practitioner and works as freelance massage therapist.
Moritz Nagel
Student Assistant
holds an MA in economics from the University of Warsaw (Poland) and a BA in area studies with a special focus on Africa from the Humboldt University of Berlin. During his BA he spent a year at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) where he was initiated into the anthropology of African religions.
Having graduated on the history of economic development under the Apartheid regime in South Africa, he went on to receive an education in applied macroeconomics. His current research conducted in pursuit of an MA in African studies at Humboldt University revisits the question of whether Duala in nineteenth-century Cameroons constituted a society characterized by segmentation.
Starting in September 2016 he is going to attend the PhD program in history at Northwestern University (USA). There, he will continue to investigate West African institutions including initiation societies, public debates, talking drums and the trust system for trade facilitation on the way toward writing a precolonial history of the area around Mount Cameroon.
Publication
Nagel, Moritz. 2014. “The Duala Drum Language: What Do We Know from Early Germanophone Sources?” in: Nepomuk Riva (Ed.). Klangbotschaften aus der Vergangenheit: Forschungen zu Aufnahmen aus dem Berliner Lautarchiv. Aachen: Shaker, 119-156.
Anton Nikolotov
After working as a student assistant at re:work, he started a PhD at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies in 2013. He works on his dissertation entitled "Geographies of afterlife: the futurist imaginations in the lives of Muslim market workers in Moscow."
Zeynep Ecem Pulas
Student Assistant
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 702 37
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 702 10
Moritz Reiter
Student Assistant, IT
is currently studying History with a focus on the 19th and 20th century as well as Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin.
Christopher Rißmann
Student Assistant
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 702 30
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 702 10
Rabea Rittgerodt
Student Assistant
Since graduating from Free University in Berlin with a degree in History, Rabea Rittgerodt worked as a trainee at h.f. ullmann publishers in Potsdam. Since 2014, she is a project editor History at Walter de Gruyter publishing house.
Elisabeth Schulz
Student Assistant
After graduating from Humboldt-University with a B.A. in area studies Asia/Africa with a focus on Japan, she enrolled in the master's program in Japanese Studies at Free University in Berlin. She currently studies at Tsukuba University in Japan.
Victoria Thiemer
Student Assistant
studies music and media as a main subject as well as social sciences as a minor subject at Humboldt University in Berlin, with a focus on the changes in history of family and the reconciliation of work and family life. In addition, she has a passion for music from all over the world due to her interest in the cultural and social background of music.
Tom Vogelgesang
Student Assistant, IT
Since fall 2011, he is enrolled in the master's program in Japanese Studies at Free University in Berlin. He works as a student assistant at the local department for literature and cultural studies.
Andreas Wagner
Student Assistant, IT
Andreas Wagner completed his studies in area studies Asia/Africa at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a bachelor thesis on ‘internal migration and its effect on urbanisation processes in Lagos, Nigeria’. He then completed the master programme ‘POLIS’ in European urban cultures at four European universities, with a focus on urban work. Currently, he is putting theoretical concepts of modern urban forms of work into practice by establishing a coworking space in Tallinn, Estonia.