Index

Khushboo Jain

Khushboo Jain

• Email: khushboo.jain@fau.de

Khushboo Jain has worked extensively towards securing rights of children in contact with railways in India including through a petition in the Delhi High Court. She is the Founding member of the All India Working Group for Rights of Children (AIWGRC), an alliance founded in June 2014 with an objective to empower children through facilitating child participation in legal reforms. Her PhD research, Home-making on the Streets of Delhi, offers a critique of the narratives of homelessness through ethnographically rich research on the practices of home-making on the streets.

Project: Home-making on the Streets of Delhi‘

‘Home-making on the Streets of Delhi’ is a deep ethnographic study of the everyday home-making practices of the street dwellers in the capital city of Delhi, India. Home-making on the streets is infused by the moral sentiment of an international narrative of home and homelessness and vexed political motivations of clean urban streets. And between these extremes lie the everyday negotiation of practices of home-making on urban streets. By exploring street dwelling in three different kinds of space – of worship, market and a railway station, this dissertation examines how different street spaces become home for its inhabitants, how the material and social space aid in the processes of home-making, and how street dwellers add to the character and the economy of these spaces. It further evaluates how the street as a space of home-making is understood in policies and interventions for street-dwellers as a way to deepen the critique of the narratives of homelessness.

Axelle Germanaz

Germanaz, Axelle

• Email: axelle.germanaz@fau.de

Axelle Germanaz is a doctoral researcher in American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. She is currently working on a dissertation with the working title “Inside the Environmental Imaginary and Cultural Spaces of the White Power Movement in the United States.” Her research examines the instrumentalization of environmentalism and the deployment of sentimentality by US far-right groups in an era of climate emergency.

Project: “Inside the Environmental Imaginary and Cultural Spaces of the White Power Movement in the United States”

My doctoral thesis examines the use of environmental rhetoric, imagery, and themes in contemporary US far-right ideology and culture. I analyze the ways adherents deploy environmentalism to naturalize and legitimize white supremacism as a viable solution to the ongoing climate crisis. In this context, I further argue that the movement is relying on sentimental aesthetics and politics to disseminate its propaganda. Members tend to deploy sentimental narratives and tropes to produce strong emotional responses from their audiences and to mobilize them toward illiberal actions. My project uses an interdisciplinary methodology and a transnational approach. I rely on various fields of research –from cultural studies, affect theory, and ecocriticism, to political science, sociology, and history– to survey the intersections between environmentalism, sentimentality, and contemporary reactionary politics in the United States. Following an approach of ideology critique, I examine the multifaceted conceptualizations and representations of the environment and climate change in the cultural products disseminated by the US white power movement between the 1980s and today.

Sofie Fingado

Sofie Fingado

• Email: sofie.fingado@fau.de

Sofie Fingado completed her B.A. in Cultural History and Theory and Social Sciences as well as her M.A. in Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-University zu Berlin, with two study semesters abroad, at the Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Københavns Universitet in Denmark. At Humboldt-Universität she has been working as a student assistant at the chair for Kulturwissenschaftliche Ästhetik und Kulturtheorie as well as an academic tutor for the introductory course Einführung in das Kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten. After her graduation, she received funding from the Humboldt Graduate School.

Project:

As war against a feeling, the „War on Terror“ is to be thought of not only as a caesura in terms of affective (wartime) politics but also with regard to the US penal system. At the same time, the global detention system and the internment practices of the US border regime which are being intensified after 9/11 are interwoven with the prison Industrial complex within the national borders of the US. In my project I wish to understand these democratically legitimated incarcerations and detentions as operating with a conceptualization of „single beings“, of individuated and singular persons. Following this assumption, I wish to understand the penal violence as directed against affective ties, intersubjective interdependence, and related/kinship subjectivity and as violent „family seperation“– and to shift attention to the ways in which the ones detained/incarcerated are imagining and (re)building a notion of self which is always already related and affectively entangled.
Here, children and other „minor figures“ are of specific interest, whose presence in sites of incarceration is activating and intensifying sentimental abolitionist politics on the one hand – and whose identity as being vulnerable and worthy of protection is becoming the site of negotiations on the other hand.

Luca Reinold

Jana Aresin

Research Project: Democracy, Consumerism and Gender Roles in U.S. American and Japanese Women’s Magazines during the Cold War

Fellowships & Grants

• 2024: Visiting PhD Researcher at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS), Uppsala University
• 2022: BAA Dartmouth Stipend, “Futures of American Studies Summer Institute”, Dartmouth College
• 2022: Bavarian Library of Congress Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center
• 2020-21: Junior research fellow at Karl-Franzens-University Graz
• 2019: BAA Summer Academy 2019, “State Narratives in Comparative Perspective”

Publications

Edited Volumes

• Katharina Gerund and Jana Aresin, eds. Civilization, Democratization, Containment: Strategies of Re-Education in Imperial Settings and Beyond. 2024.
• Silvia Schultermandl, Dijana Simić, Si Sophie Pages Whybrew and Jana Aresin eds. Affective Worldmaking. Narrative Counterpublics of Gender and Sexuality. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022.

Book Contributions

• Aresin, Jana. „Between Denazification and Reconstruction: US Occupation Policies and Practice in Germany 1945.“ The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky: Into Germany at the End of World War II. Ed. Charlotte Lerg, New York: Berghahn, 2022. 29-37.
• Aresin, Jana. „Kikujiro (菊次郎の夏, Kikujirō no natsu, 1999).“ Lexicon of Global Melodrama. Ed. Heike Paul, Sarah Marak, Katharina Gerund, Marius Henderson, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. 229-232.
• Aresin, Jana. „“We need to imagine a new kind of woman“: Narrating Identity in Postwar Women’s Magazines in Japan, 1945-1955.“ Affective Worldmaking. Narrative Counterpublics of Gender and Sexuality. Ed. Silvia Schultermandl, Dijana Simić, Si Sophie Pages Whybrew, Jana Aresin, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. 127-137.
• Silvia Schultermandl, Dijana Simić, Si Sophie Pages Whybrew and Jana Aresin. „Introduction.“ Affective Worldmaking. Narrative Counterpublics of Gender and Sexuality. Ed. Silvia Schultermandl, Dijana Simić, Si Sophie Pages Whybrew, Jana Aresin, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. 13-44.
• Aresin, Jana. „Revisiting Stunde Null: The Impact of U.S. Reeducation Policies in Post-War Germany on Transatlantic Relations.“ New Perspectives on Transatlantic Relations. Multidisciplinary Approaches. Ed. Jürgen Gebhardt, Stefan Fröhlich, Heidelberg: Winter, 2021. 71-86.
• Aresin, Jana. „Zwischen Diaspora und hybrider Identität: Generationeller Wandel in Identitätsdiskursen der koreanischen Minderheit in Japan.“ Japan 2021: Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Hrg. David Chiavacci, Iris Wieczorek. München: Iudicium, 2021. 234-257.

Journal Articles

• Gerund, Katharina, and Jana Aresin. „Civilization, Democratization, Containment: Strategies of Re-Education in Imperial Settings and Beyond.“ International History Review 46.3 (2024): 263-70.
• Aresin, Jana. „A Benevolent Empire? Representations of Women’s Liberation and Democracy in Japanese Women’s Magazines under U.S.-Occupation.“ International Japanese Studies (国際日本学/ Kokusai nihongaku) 21 (2024): 229-255.
• Aresin, Jana. „Locating Women’s Political Engagement: Democracy in Early Cold War US and Japanese Women’s Magazines, 1945–1955.“ Comparativ 31.1 (2021): 66-81.

Miscellanous

• Aresin, Jana, and Katharina Gerund. Re-educational Strategies beyond the Postwar Moment. Occupation Studies Research Network Blog. 2023.

Talks

• “Heroes or Victims of a Lost Cause? Intersecting Representations of Suicide Pilots in Japanese War Museums and Popular Culture.” Annual Conference of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan “(Un)Democratic Futures: Japan and the Global Trajectories towards an (Un)Equal World”, November 7-11, 2025, University of Vienna.
• “Imagining Social Transformation under Military Occupation: Democracy, National Identity, and Gender in Public Discourse in U.S.-Occupied Japan.” Occupation Studies Research Network Conference “Themes, Approaches, and Future Possibilities”, July 10-11, 2025, King’s College, London.
• “Alternatives to Democratic Capitalism? The Shifting Politics of Labor Activism in 1950s Japanese Women’s Magazines.” 19th Annual Conference of the Nordic Association for the Study of Contemporary Japanese Society (NAJS), May 22-23, 2025, University of Iceland, Reykjavík.
• “Raising Democratic Citizens: Women’s Rights and the Politics of the Home in early Cold War U.S. and Japanese Public Discourse.” 34^th Annual Conference of the Postgraduate Forum of the German Association for American Studies: “(Re-)Shaping the Public Sphere: Cultural Productions as/and Interventions,” November 21-23, 2024, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.
• “Learning from the Other, Defining the Self: Democracy, Women’s Rights, and International Solidarity beyond the Cold War Divide in U.S. and Japanese Women’s Magazines between 1945-1955.” SINAS Research Seminar, April 15, 2024, Uppsala University.
• “Gender and Economic Citizenship in Postwar Japan: The Politics of Women’s Labour and Consumption.” NNC / Asianet Conference: “Consuming Asia: Systems and Structures of Consumption in Modern and Contemporary Asia,” June 22-23, 2023, University of Bergen.
• “A Benevolent Empire? Representations of Women’s Liberation and Democracy in Japanese Women’s Magazines under U.S.-Occupation.” 5th EU-Japan Young Scholars Workshop: “Japanese Transnationalism and Empire,” November 4-6, 2022. Centre Européen d’Études Japonaises d’Alsace/Hosei University.
• “The Women Behind the Bamboo Curtain: Admiration and Anxiety towards ‘Red China’ in Japanese Cold War Women’s Magazines.” Workshop: “Cold War Disconnections and the Transformation of Internationalisms,” June 8-10, 2022, LMU Munich.
• “Visualizing Women at Work: Idealization and Realism in Japanese Women’s Magazines in the early Cold War.” Workshop: “The Politics of the Page: Visuality and Materiality in Illustrated Periodicals across Cold War Borders,” May 12-13, 2022, Philipps University Marburg [Online].
• “Democracy, Consumerism and Gender Roles in Japanese Women’s Magazines during U.S. occupation and the early Cold War”. International Conference: “Cultures of Occupation: New Paradigms, Models and Comparisons”, postponed to 2021, University of Nottingham.
• “Consumers, Workers, Democratic Citizens? Renegotiation of Women’s Roles in US and Japanese Women’s Magazines, 1945-1960.” Workshop: “Recreating Separate Spheres Across Not-So-Separate Worlds: Gender and Reeducation in Japan, Germany, and the USA after World War II”, February 20-21, 2020, Berkeley, CA.
• “From World War II Battlefield to Cold War Home Front? Reeducation Policies in U.S.-Occupied Japan, 1945-1952.” Workshop: “American Home Front(s)”, Bavarian American Academy Munich, July 20-21, 2019.
• “Democracy, Consumerism and Gender Roles in U.S. American and Japanese Women’s Magazines during the Cold War.” Project presentation at the annual BAA Summer Academy 2019 “State Narratives in Comparative Perspective”, May 25 – June 8, Nuremberg

Teaching

• Aktuelle Interkulturalitätstheorien (MA seminar)
• Contemporary Asian American Writing
• Genres of Feminism in Contemporary US Culture (PS)
• Cold War Culture in the United States and Beyond (PS)
• Women’s Movements and Feminism(s) in the United States (PS)
• Grundseminar Culture (GS)

Ronja Steiner

Ronja completed her bachelor’s degree at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg with a major in Scandinavian Studies and a minor in English and American Studies, including two semesters at Háskóli Íslands in Reykjavík. She continued her studies at FAU, receiving her master’s degree in English Studies with a focus on literature and culture. During her time at FAU, she was actively involved in student representation and community activities. Her academic interests include popular contemporary fantasy and science fiction, historical fiction, gender and representation, intermediality, aesthetic strategies, and narratology.

Project: Silent Tears and Steady Thrones: Navigating Change Through Sentimental Narratives of Family, Identity, and Duty in the British Period Dramas The Crown and Downton Abbey

My thesis explores how The Crown and Downton Abbey construct sentimental narratives of family, identity, and duty to navigate and emotionally mediate moments of historical and cultural transition. It investigates how both series employ emotionally resonant character arcs alongside aesthetic strategies (such as music, symbolism, and visual spectacle) to portray political and societal transformation. By grounding these shifts in private, intimate storytelling, the series offer audiences a way to process contemporary anxieties surrounding identity, continuity, and belonging. It also engages with paratextual contexts, such as podcasts, tourism, and media discourse, to show how these narratives extend their cultural influence beyond the screen, reinforcing collective imaginaries of British heritage in a post-imperial, post-Brexit cultural landscape.

Charlotte Hunsicker

Charlotte holds a BA in Political Science as well as a MA in Sociology from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Before joining the Research Training Group at FAU she worked as a research associate at SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), where she applied qualitative methodology to improvement questionnaire design. Her research interest include gender studies, care (work), and theories of social inequality.

Project: „Warm-hearted compassionate care – tailored to your family’s needs“ – Sentimental Framings in the Provision of Live-In Care

This research project examines the symbolic and emotional framings of paid care work in the context of transnational live-in care arrangements. Focusing on the websites of commercial placement agencies, the project investigates how these actors construct, market, and legitimize care services through sentimental codes, such as “loving support,” “dedication,” or “warm-hearted assistance”, that emotionally charge and morally elevate a highly precarious field of labour.

While research on live-in care has emphasised issues of migration, inequality, and labour precarity, this project addresses the symbolic dimension of how care work is represented and commodified. To do so it employs the concept of sentimentality as a socially structured communicative code that shapes how emotions are expressed, read, and regulated in public discourse.

Using Grounded Theory Methodology, the analysis traces the sentimental narratives, visual strategies, and semantic patterns through which agencies present care as both intimate and professional, familial yet marketable. The project explores how narratives of emotional proximity, moral worth, and idealised family relations are mobilised to stabilise and naturalise market-based care arrangements. It further examines how these sentimental framings contribute to the depoliticization of precarious labour arrangements and the consolidation of gendered, class-based, and migration-related structural inequalities in the care sector.

Zeyu Du

Zeyu Du holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Sichuan University and a master’s degree in Modern Chinese History from Renmin University of China. Before joining the Research Training Group at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, he spent one year as a doctoral student in the university’s Sinology Department. His research interests include modern Chinese intellectual history, Chinese diaspora studies, and Hong Kong history.

Project: A Sentimental History of Chinese Exiled Intellectuals During the Cold War, 1949-1989

The year 1949 witnessed the largest wave of intellectuals choosing exile in modern Chinese history following the establishment of the communist regime. This project undertakes a sentimental history of this diasporic group. Despite their dispersion across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, this study investigates how they formed a cohesive “emotional community,” forged through transnational networks of correspondence, shared periodicals, and the circulation of key individuals. The central aim is to analyze this community’s “structure of feelings,” exploring how sentiments such as nostalgia, patriotic worry, grief, and hope were shaped by their experiences of displacement, historical trauma, and the geopolitical order of the Cold War. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from the history of emotions (Rosenwein), cultural studies (Williams), and modern Chinese literary studies (Wang, Lee), this study positions sentimentality as its core analytical dimension, responding to a tendency in previous scholarship on Chinese exiles to prioritize political or philosophical thought while neglecting this critical aspect. Employing a focused case-study approach on three key intellectual circles, this research traces the shared sentiments that animated their transnational network. By doing so, it aims to uncover new dimensions for understanding the Chinese exiles and to contribute a new perspective to the intersection of Chinese studies, diaspora studies, and sentimental studies.

Publications

• Review of Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past, by Hang Tu. Asian Studies Review (2025). DOI:10.1080/10357823.2025.2572431
• Review of How Maoism was Made: Reconstructing China, 1949–1965, edited by Jennifer Altehenger and Aaron William Moore. The Journal of Asian Studies (forthcoming).

Sandra Grimminger

Sandra holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. After graduating, she engaged in ethnographic research projects centred on the subject of digitalisation. Her research is driven by the question of why we believe what we believe and how social reality is created. Since April 2025, she has been doing her doctorate as part of the DFG Research Training Group “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics”.

Project: The Influence of Sentimental Narratives on Collective Identity Formation in Spiritual Volunteering

The research project investigates how emotionalized narratives and sentimentally framed experiences contribute to the creation of belonging and identity in the context of spiritual volunteering. The focus is on the question of how longing, nostalgia and affective connectedness are staged, experienced and negotiated in ritualized practices and communal communication. Spiritual volunteering – for example in yoga retreats or ashrams – offers an exemplary experiential space in which romanticized notions of closeness to nature, inner authenticity and transcendent community are cultivated. The project pursues a sociology of knowledge and symbolic-interactionist approach in order to analyze the performative power of feelings and sentimentality in these social processes. Through ethnographic fieldwork and the evaluation of affectively charged interactions, the aim is to show how emotional experiences are collectively interpreted, shared and condensed into an element of identity-forming community. The focus is particularly on the social practices and narratives through which spirituality is experienced and embodied as a perceived truth.

Luiza Sydorova

Luiza studied political science and economics at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. She also completed her Master’s degree in Political Science at FAU. Her master thesis focused on Antifeminism of the New Right in Germany. Her research interests include gender studies, postcolonialism and eastern europe.

Project: Form and function of the sentimental in the negotiation process of gender relations in Ukraine after the Russian invasion

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marks a profound social turning point that is also significantly changing gender relations. This research project examines this change from the perspective of sentimentality as a discursive and social phenomenon. While classic role patterns dominated at the beginning of the war – women and children fleeing, men fighting – an increasing questioning of traditional gender roles became apparent as the war progressed. The focus is on Ukrainian discourse, which is characterized on the one hand by the construction of national identity and on the other by a conscious differentiation from Russian values. The latter favors progressive developments, such as the growing social acceptance of the LGBTQ+ movement. The sentimental dimension proves to be a central means of interpreting and controlling social change. Using critical discourse analysis, the project analyzes the role of sentimentality in the context of war, identity and gender. The aim is to open up new perspectives for interdisciplinary gender studies and to shed new light on the historical tension between the national question and the question of women.