Visiting and Permanent Fellows
The LSI welcomes early career and established researchers from Germany and abroad for visiting fellowships in Berlin. Expressions of interest, based on the LSI's current research activities and projects, are possible at any time, but should generally be received at least six months before the planned stay.
Please send your request including a letter of motivation, a CV and a short synopsis of your research work (max. five pages in total) to law-and-society@hu-berlin.de.
The association as a fellow is usually awarded for a maximum period of six months. Visiting researcher have access to the HU library, contact with senior researchers at the LSI and the opportunity to participate in all LSI events. In addition, they are expected to present their own research in a lecture, workshop discussion or a similar format. The LSI can provide financial support for fellowships in exceptional cases. Funding opportunities can be agreed individually in the event of a successful application.
In order to promote the transfer of knowledge between theory and practice, practitioners (e.g. of development cooperation, administration or the media) have the opportunity to reflect their practical experiences as a visiting researcher at the LSI. The above-mentioned conditions apply to applications for such a practitioner fellowship.
Visiting Fellows
Jonas Bornemann works as Assistant Professor for European Law at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. His research is located at the intersection between European Law and Migration Law. His research stay was made possible through a re:constitution fellowship. As part of this fellowship, he is researching collective securitization in EU migration law and its consequences for the rights of migrants.
Hedwig Lieback is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Columbia University. She has received her undergraduate and master’s degree from Leipzig University in American Studies and minored in Political Science. During her BA, she spent a year at the University of Texas at Austin and during her MA, she spent a year studying political theory at Princeton University. Currently, she works as a research assistant for Michael Doyle. At Columbia, she has taught multiple courses in political theory and intellectual history. Her research is located at the intersection of political and legal theory, intellectual history, and the sociology of law. In her dissertation, she investigates four legal reform movements in the U.S. and Germany in the 20th century and their analysis of the legal entrenchment of social inequality and potential legal remedies. Her research is supported by the Columbia Center for Political Economy.
Leonie Thies is a PhD student at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. She studied social sciences at Humboldt University and spent semesters abroad at the Universiti Sains Malaysia and the Università di Bologna. She worked at the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology at the HU Berlin, in the research group ‘Sociology of Law’ at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and in the project ‘Access to Justice in Berlin’ at the Berlin Social Science Research Centre (WZB). For her fully funded PhD she is researching practices of punishment and citizen making in dealing with criminalized youth. She leads the ‘Abolitionist Imaginaries & Praxis’ group at the University of Oxford, where she also works for the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies blog on ‘Talking about Methods’. She taught at Worcester College, University of Oxford and teaching a class on the criminalisation of urban youth at the Institute of Social Sciences, HU Berlin 2024/2025.
Ece Göztepe is Full Professor for Turkish and Comparative Constitutional Law at the Bilkent University (Ankara/Turkey). Her main research interest and expertise are Turkish and German public law, with emphasis on constitutional complaint remedy, state of emergency regimes, as well as the legal history of the Weimar Republic.
Her current research project at the LSI deals with the function of the By-Laws of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) and the German Bundestag in terms of the impact on and of the opposition parties.
Homepage: http://www.hukuk.bilkent.edu.tr/en/index.php?page=kisi&id=1
Berkant Caglar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His dissertation is tentatively titled “Contested Legalities and Harmful Judiciary: Queer Justice and Legal Activism in Turkish Courtrooms”. Intrigued by the unique challenges faced by queer individuals in their interactions with the state’s judiciary, his research critically examines the legal activism of queer pro-bono lawyers and sheds light on secular legal infrastructures. It attends to a wide variety of litigation processes for cases involving queer claimants and defendants in the domains such as legal standing, right to protest, public decency, and hate crime. In addition to this dissertation research, his ongoing minor project focuses on denialism as a governing category in post-genocidal Turkey. In his DAAD-sponsored residency, he is affiliated with the Integrative Research Institute Law and Society and the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy.
Permanent Fellows
Dr. Christian Boulanger
Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
Institute of Political Science at Leuphana University Lüneburg
Copyright: Brinkhoff-Mögenburg
Dr. Johan Horst, LL.M. (Georgetown)
Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
Prof. Dr. Jan-Werner Müller
Princeton University, Politics Department
Jan-Werner Müller is Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences und Professor of Politics at Princeton University. His recent publications are Democracy Rules (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), Furcht und Freiheit (2019) as well as Constitutional Patriotism (2010).
Dr. Ines Reiling
Dr. Anna-Julia Saiger, LL.M. (King's Collge, London)
Dr. Larissa Vetters
Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology
Dr. Yoan Vilain, LL.M.
Department of International Affairs at Humboldt University Berlin (Executive Committee Representative for International Affairs and Europe)
Former Visiting Fellows
Dr. Janna Wessels
Dr. Janna WesselsJanna Wessels is Associate Professor at the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law (ACMRL), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Prior to joining the ACMRL, Janna Wessels held positions at Justus Liebig University Giessen and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She received her PhD in refugee law from the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney and the Faculty of Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (joint degree). Janna is a member of the Dutch Meijers Committee – Standing Committee of Experts in International Immigration, Refugee and Criminal Law, an Affiliate of the Refugee Law Initiative (London), and a member of the German Network Migration Law.
Janna Wessels’ research investigates the link between human rights and migration law and policy. She is the author of the monograph “The Concealment Controversy. Sexual Orientation, Discretion Reasoning and the Scope of Refugee Protection” (CUP 2021, paperback 2023) and co-author of “Human Rights Challenges to European Migration Policy. The REMAP Study” (Hart/Nomos 2022, open access). Her current research focuses on strategic litigation by states in migration-related cases before the European Court of Human Rights (Dutch NWO Veni project and Principal Investigator of the DFG funded MeDiMi project “Who is Empowered by Strasbourg? Migrants and States before the ECtHR”).
Deniz Gedik
Deniz GedikDeniz Gedik received her BA and LLM from Galatasaray University, Istanbul, and her MA from Panteion University, Athens. She started her MPhil/PhD studies at London School of Economics and Political Science, London, before she was admitted as a visiting fellow at the LSI Berlin. Both as a lawyer registered to the Istanbul Bar Association since 2012, and a scholar, her work stands at the intersection point of social movements and law. Her PhD is on the right to resist in comparative constitutional law and her research at Humboldt University focuses on the right to resist in post-Soviet constitutionalism.
Esra Demir-Gürsel
Esra Demir-GürselEsra Demir-Gürsel (PhD) is an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Faculty of Law. After receiving her LL.M in Public Law from Istanbul University and MA in Human Rights from the University of Essex, she obtained her PhD in Public Law from Marmara University. Previously, she worked at the departments of Human Rights Law and Public Law at Marmara University in Istanbul. Between 2017 and 2020, she held visiting positions at Freie Universität Berlin and Hertie School of Governance. Her main research interests involve human rights law, the history of international law, gender and liberal legalism. Her on-going research project investigates into the limits of the European Court of Human Rights in responding to the entrenchment of authoritarianism in Turkey in comparison with the cases of other member states of the Council of Europe showing similar authoritarian tendencies. Her research traces the current limits of the Court back to the histories of the evolution of the Council of Europe and the Court.
Elisavet Lampropoulou
M2R Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne
Email: elisavet.lampropoulou@gmail.com
Elisavet Lampropoulou is currently doing research on the question of the Greek financial crisis as a type of emergency situation, on how it was treated by the case-law of the Greek Council of State while performing judicial review of constitutionality of the legislation adopted as a response to the crisis and on the de facto constitutional changes that have occured due to these emergency circumstances. She is interested in the question of emergency leading to a re-invention of the constitutional rule instead of a delegation of the rule, the relation between political power and judicial power and the role of the Council of State as legislator and quasi-constitutional court.
Dr. Stefan Salomon
Stefan Salomon is Assistant Professor of European Law at the European Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on migration and refugee law. He researches how legal governance of migration changes citizenship and produces racial inequalities. His research also covers questions of space and territory in EU law and international law. Stefan worked and conducted research in different regions and countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Before joining the University of Amsterdam, Stefan was a lecturer at the law faculty at the University of Graz, where he taught the Refugee Law Clinic, international public law and migration and asylum.
Tenured Assistant Professor in European Law at the European Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam and re:constitution Fellow.
University at Buffalo
Francesco Bosso
Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford
Mathis Stock
Université de Lausanne, Institut de géographie et durabilité
Prof. Dr. Olaf Zenker
Institut für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie, Freie Universität Berlin
Judith Eggers
Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale)
Teresa Büchsel
Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford
Benedict Vischer, MA, MLaw, LL.M. (Yale)
Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law