News

Katajun Amirpur (URPP Asia and Europe/Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) was appointed to the W3 Professorship for “Islamische Studien/Islamische Theologie” at the University of Hamburg on October 1, 2011.

Norman Backhaus (Geography/URPP Asia and Europe) was appointed as an adjunct professor of the Faculty of Science at the University of Zurich.

Benedikt Korf (Geography/URPP Asia and Europe) received the 2011 KfW Exzellenzpreis für praxisrelevante Entwicklungsforschung for his investigation of the role of hierarchical structures in Sri Lanka. He pursued this topic together with Pia Hollenbach (Geography/URPP Asia and Europe).

Raji C. Steineck and Thomas Hüllein (both Japanese Studies/URPP Asia and Europe) have received support from the Swiss National Science Foundation for a three-year research project entitled “Die Normative Wirkung des Gesundheitsbegriffs von der Revision des Eugenik-Schutzgesetzes 1995 bis zum Gesundheitsförderungsgesetz 2007.”

Seven new doctoral candidates and four new postdocs took up their research at the URPP at the beginning of the Fall semester. The doctoral candidates pursue their doctorates within the framework of URPP Asia and Europe’s doctoral program.

Henning Trüper (History/URPP Asia and  Europe) was awarded a two-year Marie- Curie Fellowship from the European Union. He started his research at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris in February 2012.

Samir Boulos (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies/URPP Asia and Europe), is a visiting fellow at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies for the academic year 2011/2012 thanks to the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Fellowship for Prospective Researchers.

The film “Children of Srikandi,” which Laura Coppens (URPP Asia and Europe/Social and Cultural Anthropology) filmed with her co-directors as part of her dissertation project, had its world premiere at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival 2012 in the section “Panorama Dokumente.” Furthermore, this film is among those being considered for the 26th Teddy Award, the world’s most prestigious prize for Queer Film.

Aliya Khawari (Political Science/URPP Asia and Europe) was awarded a one-year Marie Heim-Vögtlin fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. The fellowship is for her dissertation project “The Political Economy of Microfinance: Case Studies of MFIs in India and Pakistan.”

Nicolas Kosmatopoulos (Social and Cultural Anthropology/URPP Asia and Europe) was awarded a Fellowship for Prospective Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation, enabling him a year of research in the Department of Anthropology of Columbia University, New York.

Claudia Nef-Saluz (Social and Cultural Anthropology/URPP Asia and Europe) was awarded the University of Zurich’s Forschungskredit, effective December 1, 2011, as a one-year fellowship for the completion of her dissertation “Contemporary Forms of Islamic Student Activism in Indonesia.”

Dilyara Suleymanova (Social and Cultural Anthropology/URPP Asia and Europe) began work on January 1, 2012 as a teaching and research associate in the University of Zurich’s Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Prof. Jun’ichi Isomae (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto) was a visiting scholar at the URPP Asia and Europe in the Fall 2011 semester. His research emphasizes religious discourse in early-modern and modern Japan as well as Japanese  mythology. Recently, he published both Japanese Mythology: Hermeneutics on Scripture (2010) and Overcoming Modernity: East Asian Community and the Kyoto School (2011, co-edited with Naoki Sakai).

Dr. Jakob De Roover was a visiting scholar at the URPP Asia and Europe from October to November 2011. His research focuses on the development of liberal-democratic ideas about secularization and religious tolerance in modern Europe as well as their implementation in colonial and postcolonial India. Together with S.N. Balagangadhara, he has written multiple essays on these topics. Jakob De Roover is a member of the research group Comparative Science of Cultures at Ghent University.

Dr. Fabian Schäfer (Japanese Studies) took up the position of a senior teaching and research associate and coordinator of Research Field 3: Norms and Social Order(s) in February 2012. In 2008 Dr. Schäfer received his doctorate at the University of Leipzig with his work on The Origins of Media and Communication Studies in Prewar Japan: Early Theoretical Approaches to the Press, Journalism and Public Opinion, 1920–1937. He was a fellow of the Japan Foundation at the Tokyo University, a postdoctoral-fellow at the University of Leiden, and worked as a lecturer at the University of Leipzig from 2005 to 2012.

(Asia & Europe Bulletin, 1/2012, p. 15)