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Five Young Scholars at the Kolleg
In September and October, we welcome art historian Gladys Kalichini, political theorist Clementina Gentile Fusillo, and philosophers Philip Mills, Belén Pueyo-Ibáñez and Larissa Wallner, who will be living and working at the Institute in the 2024/25 academic year.
Clementina Gentile Fusillo studied at the University of Trieste, SOAS University of London, and the University of Naples. She completed her PhD in Politics and International Relations at the University of Warwick in 2021; her dissertation is entitled »On the Virtues of Truth: Generativity and the Demands of Democracy.« She has since taught in various positions at the Universities of Sheffield, Warwick, and London.
Her research project »Power and the Representative. Towards a new normative theory of democratic representation« is based on the observation that democratic representation today faces unprecedented challenges: national borders are being challenged and changing their meaning, both political parties and political communication are in crisis, and talk of ›post-factual politics‹ is driving politicians to despair. Against this backdrop, Gentile Fusillo addresses theories of representation and the increasing calls for a new normative justification of political representation. She is particularly interested in the dynamics of power in which political representatives are involved: in relation to the people they represent, to the general public, and to other representatives.
Clementina Gentile Fusillo is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of Professor Rainer Forst and the Justitia Center for Advanced Studies, funded by the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation.
Gladys Kalichini is an art historian and visual artist from Lusaka, Zambia. After completing a Master of Fine Arts, she received her doctorate in art history and visual culture from Rhodes University in South Africa in 2023. In her academic and artistic work, she focuses on the history of liberation movements in African states, the culture of remembrance, and the role of women in history and historiography. Guest residencies and lecture invitations have taken her to Africa, Europe, and the USA. Her artistic work is currently being shown in solo exhibitions at the Fiona and Sydney Myer Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, and at the Frauen Museum Wiesbaden. In 2022, she was awarded the prestigious Henrike Grohs Art Award by the Goethe Institute.
In her research project »The Art of Seeing Women in Visual Portrayals of Liberation Movements in Africa,« she examines the visual narratives surrounding liberation movements in African countries, particularly in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Her focus is on the question of whether and how the participation of women – who are usually absent from a historiography shaped by a colonial gaze – is made audible and visible in the visual narratives.
Gladys Kalichini is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of the research focus »Democratic Vistas. Reflections on the Atlantic World.«
Philip Mills studied philosophy and French literature at the University of Lausanne. In 2019, he completed his PhD in Philosophy at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He then taught French literature and philosophy at the University of Lausanne. A guest stay took him to Duke University (North Carolina) in the fall semester of 2022. Mills is the author of numerous essays on questions at the intersection of literature and philosophy.
His research project »Poetic Forms of Life and Democracy« combines poetry and philosophy. He examines how contemporary poets, especially French and American, invent and describe new forms of life or criticize and seek to change existing forms of life. He is particularly interested in the creative potential that lies in poetry’s engagement with the ethical, social, and political issues of our time and the question of how poetic practice can contribute to a transformation of society and democratic forms of life.
Philip Mills is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of the research focus »Democratic Vistas. Reflections on the Atlantic World.«
Belén Pueyo-Ibáñez initially studied violin and journalism in Barcelona and, after a period at Goldsmiths, University of London completed her master’s degree in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 2023, she received her doctorate in philosophy from Emory University in Atlanta, where she also gained a certificate from the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture. Her dissertation was ranked as one of the top three among the two hundred submitted in the humanities and social sciences at her university in 2023.
In her research project »Rationality in a Polarized Society: Exploring the Socio-Affective Preconditions of Collective Discourse,« she examines collective discourse in times of social and political uncertainty. She argues that conventional explanatory patterns focusing exclusively on rationality offer an inadequate analysis of current tendencies of polarization and the erosion of democracy. We would do better, she argues, also to consider the socio-affective dimension of these phenomena. Doing so would not only provide an appropriate description of them, it would also open up possibilities for regaining democratic stability.
Belén Pueyo-Ibáñez is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of the research focus »Democratic Vistas. Reflections on the Atlantic World.«
Larissa Wallner studied philosophy, law, and literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 2023, she completed her doctorate in philosophy at Munich with a thesis on Kant’s concept of theoretical productivity. Her study Dimensionen der Zeit. Die Zeitphilosophie Kants und Husserls, which emerged from her master’s thesis, was published by Passagen Verlag, Vienna, in 2018. She is currently preparing her doctoral thesis for publication.
In her new research project »›Future of Democracy‹: Adaptive and resilient democracy,« she deals with the challenges for the future of democracy that are associated with the transformation of political communication through the increasing use of digital information technologies. She asks how democracies can meet these challenges in a discussion of two books, Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Inc. Managed Democracy and the Specter of inverted Totalitarianism (2008) and Jürgen Habermas’s Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (2022). In doing so, she draws on concepts from Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant.
Larissa Wallner is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of Professor Rainer Forst and the Justitia Center for Advanced Studies, funded by the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation.
