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Topics in February

Jan 28, 2013

Sabbatical in Dahlem

Sarah Stroumsa is a scholar of Islamic studies and Jewish studies. She is currently conducting research at Freie Universität Berlin as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award winner.

Islamic and Jewish studies scholar Sarah Stroumsa studies the shared intellectual history of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Islamic Middle Ages

Research transcends boundaries. This is especially true of the well-known professor of Islamic and Jewish studies Sarah Stroumsa, who is currently spending a year as an Alexander von Humboldt program research fellow at the research unit headed by Professor Sabine Schmidtke at Freie Universität Berlin. An Israeli whose family spoke German and who studied not only Jewish philosophy, but also Arabic language and literature, Stroumsa, a former rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is used to encountering resistance – but also to overcoming it.

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A Dead-end Street

In her research for her doctoral dissertation at the Path Dependency Research Center, the graduate in business management, Philine Erfurt, identified a particular type of manager in German businesses.

Organizational studies scholar Philine Erfurt has studied why the leadership of German businesses is still characterized by a particular type of manager

He chats with colleagues about soccer during breaks in meetings, uses a company car, makes phone calls on a company phone, and works out at the same gym as employees. According to Philine Erfurt, that is a rough idea of the typical manager found at most German businesses, despite calls for greater diversity in the workforce. And he is also still employers’ preference. As part of her dissertation in the “Path Dependency” research training group at Freie Universität, junior scholar Erfurt studied why it is so difficult for employers to break free of conventional decision-making processes when hiring staff – and how to bring different perspectives to management levels.

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Wars, Crises, and Conflicts

German media designated the Egyptian protests that started at Tahrir Square in Cairo during the so-called Arab Spring as a “Facebook revolution.” The photo shown here is from March 2011.

Junior professor Carola Richter studies media systems in the Arab world

A backpacking trip to Morocco after secondary school first sparked Carola Richter’s interest in the Arabic language and Arab culture. Richter later went on to study communications and media studies at the University of Leipzig, spending a semester at Birzeit University, in Palestine. Since August 2011, Richter, now a junior professor, has been teaching international communication at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her concentration: media systems in the Arab world.

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