Aktuelle Visiting Fellows
Vesna Vuković
Vesna Vuković is a PhD candidate at the University of Zadar’s Department of Art History, with a dissertation titled “Women’s Visual Art Production, Feminism and the Cultural Logic of Late Socialism: Contradictions and Correlations”. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art relations with political and social movements, socially engaged art, and socialist and Marxist feminism.
She was an associate at the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb and the Art Academy in Split, and has been lecturing in the framework of a few non-institutional educational programs. Her writings on Yugoslav art, contemporary art and theory have been published in academic journals, publications, as well as magazines and exhibition catalogues.
As a member of Zagreb-based curatorial collective [BLOK], she has conducted numerous exhibitions, researches, publications and projects in the field of socially engaged art. From 2018 she has been editor of the BLOK's book series Tendencija, focused on the Marxist approach to art history.
Brownbag: The UN Decade for Women in Art in Socialist Yugoslavia. Challenging the Autonomous Paradigm
Seven ERDOĞAN
Seven ERDOĞAN is currently an Associate Professor at the International Relations Department of Recep Tayyip Erdogan University. She graduated from Boğaziçi University (İstanbul, Turkey) in 2007 and received her MA degree from Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) in 2010. Her MA thesis is on the Western Question of Muslim societies. She holds a PhD degree in European Studies from Ankara University (Ankara, Turkey). Her dissertation is on the role of the supranational institutions of the European Union in the accession process.
Her main research interests focus on various aspects of European integration, including the EU's external relations with accession and neighbourhood policy countries, the historical and institutional development of the Union, and the EU's migration agenda. She has published numerous book chapters and articles and has given numerous presentations and speeches. She is on the editorial board of two academic journals. She is also a member of the global paradiplomacy network.
In addition to her long and continuing interest in research on the European Union, her recent studies have focused on gender, paradiplomacy and climate change. Her recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Asian and African Studies and the Asian Journal of Women's Studies, indexed in SSCI. Her most recent piece entitled "From Neighbours to Potential Members: Is the War in Ukraine a Critical Juncture for the European Union's Enlargement Policy?" will be published on March 2025 in Siyasal: Journal of Political Sciences, indexed in ESCI.
Oliver Kannenberg
Oliver Kannenberg ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Parlamentarismusforschung (IParl) in Berlin und Doktorand an der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, wo er seinen Master-Abschluss im Studienprogramm „Parlamentsfragen und Zivilgesellschaft“ erworben hat. In seiner Dissertation beschäftigt er sich mit den Institutionalisierungsprozessen der Parlamente in Kroatien, Montenegro und Serbien.
Olivers Forschungsschwerpunkte umfassen die vergleichende Parlamentarismusforschung, Koalitionsbildungsprozesse sowie die Organisation und (personelle) Stabilität von Parlamentsfraktionen. Der regionale Schwerpunkt seiner Arbeit liegt neben Deutschland auf den Parlamenten und politischen Systemen Südosteuropas.
Gabriele Leone
Gabriele Leone, Ph.D., holds a master’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Calabria (UNICAL), where he completed a thesis on the birth and evolution of protest in the Turkish Republic and the role of the PKK in the Kurdish movement. His Ph.D. dissertation, which was done at the University of Lapland, focused on political-philosophical investigations aimed at clarifying the power relations between the Turkish nation-state and the unrecognized Kurdish minority. This research contributes to the extensive literature on the subject, particularly addressing the segment of biopolitical mechanisms and their potential totalitarian effects on Turkish democracy.
During the Summer Semester of 2023, Gabriele Leone was a Junior Visiting Fellow in the Field of Excellence “Dimensions of Europe” Program. While residing in Graz from March to June 2023, he researched the project titled “Turkey: Biopolitics and National Identity.” His work explored the motivations driving the nation-state to employ biopolitical practices, understood as biological extrapolations of the political enemy, and examined the prospects for a possible rapprochement between Turkey and the EU regarding offers for the Kurdish minority. During the academic year 2024/2025, Gabriele Leone will be a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Southeast European Studies.
Brown Bag: “Turkish-Syrian Border in the Aftermath of the Syrian Civil War: Between Necropolitics, Gender, and Ethnicity”.
Vujo Ilić
Vujo Ilić is a research fellow and assistant director at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. He holds a PhD in political science from Central European University, Budapest, where he specialized in comparative politics. His research interests include elections and democracy, political participation, conflicts, and violence, with a focus on Southeast Europe.
At the Institute, Vujo contributes to several research projects, including the Network of Networks for Democracy (Nets4Dem) and Enlightened Trust (EnTrust), both funded by the Horizon Europe program. He is also a member of the Laboratory for Active Citizenship and Democratic Innovations. As an expert, he frequently consults for domestic and international organizations, specializing in public policy development and empirical research design, with an emphasis on election observation, citizen assemblies, and opinion surveys.
Recently, he co-edited Participatory Democratic Innovations in Southeast Europe (Routledge, 2024), contributed to Civic and Uncivic Values in Hungary (Routledge, 2024), and co-authored “The Pandemic in Illiberal Democracies” in Southeast European and Black Sea Studies (2024). He has received several awards, including the Central European University Best Dissertation Award (2020) and the Association for the Study of Nationalities Best Doctoral Paper Award (2016)..
Brown Bag: “Autocratic Entrenchment in Central and East European Constitutional Courts”.