We warmly welcome Liudmyla Pidkuimukha and Elspeth Oppermann as new Visiting Fellow at the TraCe Research Center!
From August until October 2025, Liudmyla Pidkuimukha will be a Visiting Fellow at Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she has already been working as a postdoctoral researcher until April 2025. In addition to several positions as a visiting lecturer at the University of Toronto, TU Dresden, FSU Jena and Jagiellonian University, she also lectured at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. As a sociolinguist and Slavist specializing in language policy, ideology and cultural studies, her research focuses on the language of violence and the construction of distinctions through the dichotomy of “us” vs. “them” in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Her focus is on language ideology, policy, planning, and the language of war and in conflict. During her fellowship at TraCe, she primarily focuses on gaining a deeper understanding of how language functions both as a target and as an instrument in political violence and wartime resistance. Her work is located in Research Area Interpretations.
From August to November 2025, Elspeth Oppermann will be a Visiting Fellow at Marburg University. As a human geographer focusing on adaptation to climate change, she is interested in heat stress as a question of political violence. Previous research has examined climate change adaptation decision-support tools for organizations in the United Kingdom and the social practices through which industrial workers adapt to extreme heat in Australia, Singapore and Vietnam. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig Maximilian University. During her TraCe fellowship, she will examine the ethics and politics of this and explore how heat stress and how heat stress and its impacts – such as heat-related illness, morbidity and mortality – amount to forms of political violence. Her work is located in Research Area Synergies.