KWI NEWS 4/2026

+ Elizaveta Berezina is a cultural historian whose work examines artistic and craft practices across different institutional and political contexts. At KWI, she will work on a comparative study of the institutions that organized craft production in selected state-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe after 1945.

+ Yasmina El Chami is an architect and assistant professor in architectural humanities. Her work explores the architecture of informal imperial actors in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern Mediterranean. At KWI, she will examine the role of American education in the shaping of scientific cultures in the post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean.

+ Onur Erdur is a historian specializing in global intellectual history, the history of knowledge, and contemporary history. His project at KWI interrogates the characterization of the long 1990s as a transitional decade marked by globalization, technological transformation, and shifting cultural paradigms, asking how a history of the humanities in the 1990s could be written.

+ Gai Farchi is a scholar of literature and cultural studies. His current research examines the intersection of witnessing discourse and generative AI aesthetics. At KWI, he will focus on the coexistence of generic aesthetics and hyper-personalisation in postindustrial and platform capitalism.

+ James Farrer is a professor of sociology and global studies, engaged in ethnographic fieldwork on youth sexual culture, nightlife, migration, and food. At KWI, he is working on two related projects, comparing migrant restaurants in rural towns in Germany and Japan, and finishing a book with the working title Seeking the Good Life in Tokyo.

+ Martin Herrnstadt is a historian of science and knowledge with a focus on the history of the humanities and social sciences from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. As Thyssen@KWI Fellow, he will explore the history of the monographic method as a transnational tradition of applied environmental and social knowledge that emerged in the mining sciences.

+ Youssef Ibrahim is a sociologist interested in science, globalization, and organizations. At KWI, he is developing a new research project on world problems, examining how actors across different social worlds, including science and the mass media, identify issues and elevate them to matters of global concern. 

+ Anna Nasser is a historian of modern France and the European empires. Her research at KWI will investigate the intersection of decolonisation processes across France, the United Kingdom, and Belgium by focusing on how their late imperial policies influenced specific rights in the metropolitan space between 1945 and 1960.

+ Aaron Neiman is a medical anthropologist studying the ways we seek, talk about, and conceive of therapy. His project at KWI will explore the rise of computer-automated therapy programs and the changes they have brought to popular and scientific understandings of mental health.

+ Jungmo Youn is a historian of media and culture whose research examines the formative process of capitalistic rationality in East Asia. At KWI, he will focus on the academic experiences of Chinese university students, from undergraduate studies in China to the completion of MA degrees in the UK and Hong Kong.