Team
Project leaders & supervisors
Prof. Dr. Ulf Schmidt
Prof. Dr. Ulf Schmidt (Speaker) is Professor of Modern History at the University of Hamburg and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His research interests are in the area of the history of modern medical ethics, warfare and policy in twentieth-century Europe and the United States. He is especially interested in the history of authoritarian regimes and dictatorships. He has published widely on the history of Nazi Germany, the history of human experimentation during the Cold War, the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial and the Nuremberg Code, the history of eugenics and euthanasia, and the history of propaganda. He is the author, among others, of “Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Germany, 1933–1945” (2002); “Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’ Trial” (2004); “Karl Brand: The Nazi Doctor. Medicine and Power in the Third Reich” (2007); “Secret Science. A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments” (2015); “Propaganda and Conflict: War, Media and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century” (2019), and “Ethical Research: The Declaration of Helsinki, and the Past, Present, and Future of Human Experimentation” (2020), published with OUP. He is one of the PIs of the ERC Synergy project on “Taming the European Leviathan: the Post-War Legacy of Medicine and the Common Good”.
Prof. Dr. Gertraud Koch
Prof. Dr. Gertraud Koch (Speaker) is Professor of Anthropological Studies in Culture and History at University of Hamburg. She has studied digitization as social and cultural phenomenon since the 1990s. In her research she combines approaches from Science and Technology Studies, Digital Humanities, Media Archeology, and Critical Data Studies and with an emphasis on methodological and theoretical frameworks (e.g. Digitisation. Theories and concepts for empirical cultural research, 2017). Another research is diversity social inclusion (e.g. Pathways to empathy 2013, with Stefanie Everke Buchanan). Her research on intangible cultural heritage and memory making link to her activities in the German Commission for UNESCO, as member and Vize Chair of the Expert Committee Intangible Cultural Heritage. She is Coordinator of POEM. Participatory Memory Practices. Concepts, strategies and media infrastructures for envisioning socially inclusive potential futures of European Societies through culture. The Innovative Training Network, funded by Horizon 2020 MSCA, addresses the urgent need of experts in the heritage sector who are qualified for working with the mediatized memory ecology, the changing socio-technical, organisational, legal, economic, and ethical frameworks for the use of cultural materials.
Prof. Dr. Katrin Fahlenbrach
Prof. Dr. Kathrin Fahlenbrach is professor for media studies at the Department for Media and Communication at the University of Hamburg. Her main research fields are: emotion and cognition in audiovisual and digital media; embodied metaphors in pictures and audiovisual media; media icons in mass media and online media; visual performances and the role of images in protest movements and online-activism. Her works include (2019) Medien, Geschichte, Wahrnehmung. Ein Lehrbuch zur Mediengeschichte. Wiesbaden: Springer VS-Verlag. (2010) Audiovisuelle Metaphern. Zur Körper- & Affektästhetik in Film und Fernsehen. Marburg: Schüren-Verlag; edited volumes: (2016) Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games: Cognitive Approaches (New York/London: Routledge). (2017) Protest Cultures. A Companion. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books. (together with Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth).
Prof. Dr. Otto Habeck
Prof. Dr. Joachim Otto Habeck teaches social anthropology at Universität Hamburg. His research interests comprise the nexus of indigenous land use and permafrost; pastoralism in northern Eurasia and Mongolia; agrarian history in socialist societies; notions of “culture” (cultivatedness), gender and lifestyle in diverse regional settings. He served as German representative in the Social and Human Working Group of the International Arctic Science Committee. Within the Horizon-2020 Project CHARTER (Drivers and Feedbacks of Changes in Arctic Terrestrial Biodiversity) Habeck is lead scientist of Work-Package 3, investigating the social-economic dynamics of environmental change in reindeer-herding communities. He has also conducted research on cultural aspects of masculinity and the body, on alcohol consumption and hangover. Among other publications, he has written monographs about Arctic pastoralism and the concept of culture in Russia, including What it Means to Be a Herdsman: the practice and image of reindeer husbandry among the Komi of Northern Russia (2005) and Das Kulturhaus in Russland: postsozialistische Kulturarbeit zwischen Ideal und Verwahrlosung (2014). He is co-editor of Nomadic and Indigenous Spaces: productions and cognitions (Ashgate, 2013) and editor of Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North (Open Book Publishers, 2019).
Supervisors
Prof. Dr. Katrin Fahlenbrach
Prof. Dr. Kathrin Fahlenbrach is professor for media studies at the Department for Media and Communication at the University of Hamburg. Her main research fields are: emotion and cognition in audiovisual and digital media; embodied metaphors in pictures and audiovisual media; media icons in mass media and online media; visual performances and the role of images in protest movements and online-activism. Her works include (2019) Medien, Geschichte, Wahrnehmung. Ein Lehrbuch zur Mediengeschichte. Wiesbaden: Springer VS-Verlag. (2010) Audiovisuelle Metaphern. Zur Körper- & Affektästhetik in Film und Fernsehen. Marburg: Schüren-Verlag; edited volumes: (2016) Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games: Cognitive Approaches (New York/London: Routledge). (2017) Protest Cultures. A Companion. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books. (together with Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth).
Prof. Dr. Otto Habeck
Prof. Dr. Joachim Otto Habeck teaches social anthropology at Universität Hamburg. His research interests comprise the nexus of indigenous land use and permafrost; pastoralism in northern Eurasia and Mongolia; agrarian history in socialist societies; notions of “culture” (cultivatedness), gender and lifestyle in diverse regional settings. He served as German representative in the Social and Human Working Group of the International Arctic Science Committee. Within the Horizon-2020 Project CHARTER (Drivers and Feedbacks of Changes in Arctic Terrestrial Biodiversity) Habeck is lead scientist of Work-Package 3, investigating the social-economic dynamics of environmental change in reindeer-herding communities. He has also conducted research on cultural aspects of masculinity and the body, on alcohol consumption and hangover. Among other publications, he has written monographs about Arctic pastoralism and the concept of culture in Russia, including What it Means to Be a Herdsman: the practice and image of reindeer husbandry among the Komi of Northern Russia (2005) and Das Kulturhaus in Russland: postsozialistische Kulturarbeit zwischen Ideal und Verwahrlosung (2014). He is co-editor of Nomadic and Indigenous Spaces: productions and cognitions (Ashgate, 2013) and editor of Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North (Open Book Publishers, 2019).
Post-Docs
Dr. Lesley Branagan
Dr. Lesley Branagan is a social anthropologist whose work is broadly situated in the sub-fields of medical anthropology, health, gender studies and conceptions of the state. Her academic research has focused on innovative grassroots approaches to healthcare forged by marginalised actors in India. It considers how – within a field of competing tensions (ideologies, practices, services, individual needs and public health policies) – people develop intricate methods to strive for good care and agency. Her fieldwork has spanned low-income urban areas and a faith healing temple in south India that introduced psychiatry – research for which she received a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award. Her postdoctoral research addresses adverse events following immunisation, particularly vaccine-induced Long Covid.
Contact: lesley.branagan@uni-hamburg.de
PhD-Students
Dr Carolin Albers
Institute for Empirical Cultural Studies

Carolin Albers is an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in medicine and anthropology, driven by an interest in the intersections of health and society. Before entering the realm of the medical humanities, she studied medicine at Charité Berlin and Istanbul University. While she has practised in different medical disciplines, she has always been fascinated by the psychiatric field and its entanglements with larger-scale problems in society. Adding the anthropological lens through a Master’s in Medical Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam allowed her to expand her critical perspective from the local to the global, from the individual to the structural. Her main research interests include discrimination, stigma, knowledge production, and social justice, which she also explores in her doctoral thesis called "Stigma and the vaccine: unknowns around marginalisation and mental health in pandemic times".
Contact: carolin.albers-1"AT"uni-hamburg.de
Nataliya Aluferova
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Nataliya Aluferova is a social researcher whose research interests lie in the field of micro-sociology and anthropology of feelings. She received her bachelor’s degree in Sociology at the “Higher School of Economics” in St Petersburg. Her bachelor’s research examined how students’ inattention is built into the structure of social interactions in a classroom and how students challenge the dominant behaviour of the teacher, trying to change the balance of power. Nataliya got her master’s degrees in Cultural Anthropology (at the European University of St Petersburg) and in Sociology (within the joint program of Manchester University and Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences). Using the method of participant observation in a small rural community in central Russia, she investigated how privacy boundaries are connected with feelings of shame and embarrassment. Nataliya's PhD project is "(Dis)Trust and suspicion: perceptions of vaccinations among Russian-speaking people in Germany". In this research, feelings of trust and distrust will be used as analytical categories to explore experiences with the German healthcare system and vaccination processes.
Contact: nataliya.aluferova"AT"uni-hamburg.de
See more at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology's webpage.
Department of History

Peter Banks is a history scholar interested in studying the relationship between propaganda and the spatial environment, and its subsequent cultural experience. He studied both his Bachelors and Masters at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. For his Masters dissertation he examined the Berlin 1936 and Munich 1972 Olympics, highlighting the ways in which both Games utilised the spatial environment as a means of propaganda. Such research involved analysis of landscape, architecture, images, and design. Peter's PhD-project is "Spatial Propaganda during the German Democratic Republic’s Poliomyelitis Vaccination Campaign".
Tobias Becker
Institute for Media and Communication
Tobias Becker is a media and cultural scholar and investigates how visuality shapes and is vice versa shaped by culture in everyday life. He studied cultural anthropology at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau, Basel and Oslo. In his research on visual culture, he uses a qualitative and micro-level approach for close analyses of empirical findings. How history shapes and influences current forms of visual culture is of particular interest to him in order to explore the powerful intersections between past and present that are at play in the media surroundings and cultural imageries of contemporary daily life. Tobias’ PhD project “Visualities of Vaccination under Media Transitions” explores how depictions of vaccination have emerged and undergone changes over the course of media history.
Contact: tobias.becker"AT"uni-hamburg.de
See Institute of Media and Communication's website.
Florian Helfer
Institute for Empirical Cultural Studies

Florian Helfer is a Cultural Anthropologist interested in the study of moral norms in the fields of medical and policy anthropology, conducting research within medical and political fields. In his bachelor’s degree at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, he focused on the areas of medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies. He continued his studies with a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hamburg. For his thesis, he conducted ethnographic research with government employees working in cultural administration offices in the cities of Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Berlin, where he analysed forms of agency those government workers have within the processes of policy-making. Florian's PhD-project is "Should we all get Vaccinated? Ethical and moral discourse in a viral world".
Contact: florian.david.helfer"AT"uni-hamburg.de
For more information please see https://www.kulturwissenschaften.uni-hamburg.de/ekw/personen/florian-helfer.html.