Current Fellows

March–June 2026
david[at]bebnowski.de

I am a historian and social scientist specializing in the intellectual and political history of feminism, the new right, and the new left. Until February 2026 I was a postdoc in an ERC project at the America Institute at LMU Munich. My publications include Die Alternative für Deutschland (2015) and Kämpfe mit Marx (2021).

Conservative Libertarianism

Drawing on self-characterizations of the contemporary German right-wing party AfD as “conservative libertarian,” my project argues that this seemingly recent political tendency has deep historical roots in the interwar period. My thesis is that economic liberals and more traditional conservative political strains were tied together by their shared motivation to thwart popular demands for a democratization of Germany. By investigating political actors across party lines, young conservative clubs, economic lobby organizations, and scientific interest groups in the Weimar period, my goal is to outline a political network that can be described as conservative libertarian.

Photo: Maik Reepschlaeger/ Fotodesign Braunschweig

Fellow, May–June 2026
sashabkatz[at]gmail.com

I am an independent researcher and artist working between the history of science, the medical humanities, and artistic research. I co-organize the working group Performing Science and Medicine and was recently a visiting postdoctoral researcher at Bielefeld Universität and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

A Matter of Healing: Clay as an Actant in Psychological Therapy

A Matter of Healing studies clay as a central actor in the development of art therapy theories and techniques. Utilizing archival research, oral history interviews, and hands-on workshops, it examines the many uses of clay as a therapeutic medium in psychotherapy, art therapy, and occupational therapy, whether as a healing agent, communicative tool, diagnostic aid, or medium for occupational practice. The project traces how clay’s material properties have been mobilized to reinforce, but also unsettle, psychological concepts such as development, trauma, and deviancy and how clay and its users generate alternative understandings of the psyche and of healing.

Photo: Sasha Bergstrom-Katz

April–September 2026
daermann[at]culture.hu-berlin.de

I am Professor of Cultural Theory and the Cultural History of Aesthetics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. My work was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize by the German Academy for Language and Literature in 2022. I co-edit the De Gruyter series Undisziplinierte Bücher on diagnoses of the times and their genealogies.

Child Analysis in the Face of the Shoah

To what extent has Freudian psychoanalysis changed our understanding of childhood? This question takes on a completely different meaning in the context of genocidal destruction of childhood. After the liberation of the concentration camps and ghettos, child analysts in the United Kingdom accompanied surviving children into a life without barbed wire. With the help of psychoanalytic recording, conversation, and drawing techniques, they focused their attention on the experiences of the surviving Jewish children and saw them not only as victims, but also as subjects with their own practices of collective survival and an egalitarian siblinghood that thwarted basic psychoanalytic assumptions.

Photo: private

Fellow, March–June 2026
Kylie.Message-Jones[at]anu.edu.au

I am Professor of Public and Interdisciplinary Humanities and director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. My books include Museums and Social Activism: Engaged Protest (2014), Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street (2020), and Museums and Racism (2018).

Dissent and Dissonance: Activist Collections in National Museums

Objects in museum collections evidence relationships between humans and the systems we construct to make sense of our world. However, while contemporary museum scholarship has become comfortable with the idea that the meaning ascribed to objects is not static, it less frequently understands systems as being similarly affective and agile. Using a case study drawn from a sample of 2,000 activist objects representing dozens of political causes, which I put in historical and global context, this research compares methods and systems of governance and dissent (and governance in dissenting systems) to explore whether and how participatory democracy can operate as a principle and practice that is shared, perhaps unexpectedly, by some political movements and national cultural institutions alike.

Photo: Amanda Thorson

July–August 2026; April–July 2027
dbr[at]uoregon.edu

I am Professor of History at the University of Oregon. An intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe, my focus is the history of information and information graphics. Among my publications are Histories of the Future (2005) and Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (new ed. 2013).

The Age of the Keyword 

There may be no word more characteristic of our information age than “keyword” itself, but the familiarity of the term masks its complexity. Common as it has become, until quite recently, “keyword” was still a term with distinct and specialized disciplinary meanings in information science and cultural theory. But with the rise of the search engine, the senses developed in these different disciplines became bound together. The story of this hybridization provides insight into the process by which computers became mediators of culture while also shedding light on continuities and divergences between models of text analysis within the humanities and without.

May 2026
helen.small[at]ell.ox.ac.uk

I am Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. My books include The Long Life (2007), a study of the literature and philosophy of ageing; The Value of the Humanities (2013); and The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time (2020).

Changing Humanities 

Changing Humanities returns to the terrain of The Value of the Humanities (2013) with the aim of capturing major changes in the underlying cultural and political situation that have a bearing on the work of humanities disciplines. It examines the shift toward short-form “liquid” units of culture, the rapid permeation of the digital sphere by AI, the changing first-language base of the UK and most European countries, the growing environmental crisis, intensifying international conflict, and the spread of war. This new book looks to recast advocacy for the humanities by equipping it to take clearer account of these very significant changes, addressing the challenges presented to perceptions of the humanities’ public value and in some cases their ongoing viability.