Visiting Fellows
About
The visiting fellows programme is designed to facilitate intellectual exchange between our members and the wider academic community. The scheme accommodates junior scholars who wish to spend a period of time in Lucerne pursuing work that overlaps with or otherwise complements scholarly activities currently being pursued at the institute. During their stay, fellows enjoy access to our specialist resources, and are invited to share and develop their ideas with our community of faculty, researchers and students.
Tailored to PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers, the programme is open to all working critically, theoretically and innovatively at the intersections between law, the humanities and the social sciences. A leading aim of the scheme is to foster conversations that cut across borders both geographic and disciplinary. We strongly believe that the academic and international diversity of our fellows greatly enriches the intellectual life of the institute.
Fellowship at a Glance
Visiting fellows are provided with workspace at the university, some administrative support, a fixed stipend for accommodation and living costs, and economy travel to and from Lucerne.
During the period of their visit, fellows are invited to contribute fully to the intellectual life of the institute by participating in our programme of workshops, seminars, reading groups and colloquia. They are encouraged to interact with all our members, including our own PhD and postdoctoral researchers, and are invited to take advantage of activities on offer across the university.
It is expected that fellows are resident in Lucerne for the duration of their stay. Upon completion of their visit, fellows are requested to submit a short report of their experiences.
Self-Funded Fellowships
Applications for self-funded fellowships at the institute are accepted and assessed on a rolling basis. The scheme runs in parallel to the funded visiting fellows programme and is open to PhD candidates and postdocs who wish to make a genuine contribution to the research environment at the institute. Please note that our ability to accommodate self-funded fellows is dependent on the availability of resources at any given time.
Enquiries
Enquiries about possibilities for visiting the institute as a fellow are welcome at all times. Please contact Dr. Steven Howe (steven.howe@unilu.ch).
Fellows 2026
Lidia Celli holds a PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Urbino (2023). Her research lies at the intersection of political and institutional history, gender history, and cultural studies, with a focus on transitional justice, marginality, and deviance in twentieth-century Italy. Her doctoral dissertation explored penal and social judgments directed at female collaborationists and women partisans in the aftermath of the Second World War (1944–1955).
She held a research fellowship at the University of Padua (2024–2025) within the PRIN project Mobility Without Borders: People, Geographies, and the Courts of Italian Military Justice in the 20th Century. The Case of Turin. Her previous research experience includes collaborations with the Istituto Piemontese per la Storia della Resistenza and the Istituto di Storia Contemporanea di Pesaro.
Celli is the author of two monographs: Donne di partito (Metauro, 2024) and Giudicare, punire, normalizzare (Viella, 2025), the latter awarded the Pavone Prize.
During her fellowship at the institute, Lidia will be working on her project Judicial Power and Gender Boundaries: The Case of Swiss Women Magistrates.
Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert is a Lecturer in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He works at the intersection of film theory, gender studies, and digital humanities, with a focus on archival recovery and transnational media histories. His research explores cinema as a site of cultural memory, particularly in contexts of displacement, resistance, and historical rupture. His work engages early sound cinema, exile narratives, and the aesthetics of interwar Europe, while developing digital tools and frameworks for media preservation and scholarly access. He is co-editor (with Jan-Christopher Horak) of Enchanted by Cinema: Wilhelm Thiele between Vienna, Berlin, and Hollywood (Berghahn, 2024), shortlisted for the 2025 Willy Haas Prize. His publications include articles in Journal of Film Preservation and Filmblatt, as well as chapters in volumes such as Goethe als Literatur-Figur (Wallstein, 2016), Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema (Berghahn, 2020), Die Musik macht den Ton: Zwischen Filmkomödie und Musical (edition text + kritik, 2025), and Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2025).
He earned his BA from the University of Geneva in German and English literatures and his PhD from UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. He also holds Graduate Certificates in Gender Studies and Digital Humanities and is a former Skirball Center and Leo Baeck Institute Fellow.
Previous Fellows
2025: Sabarish Suresh, Alessandro Volpi
2024: Veronica Pecile, Lana K. Gotvan
2023: Cody Rei-Anderson, Péter Techet
2022: Lisa Stuckey, Cristiano Moita
2021: Laura Knöpfel, Nicole Karam (postponed due to covid)
2020: Alexander Damianos, Fernando Tagle
2019: Paolo Do, Laura Petersen, Amadou Sow
2018: Michael Monterossi, Justine Poon
2017: Matthew Birkhold, Tze Ping Lim
2016: Jan Broulik, Georg Grünstäudl
2015: Kyriaki Pavlidou
2014: Mariavittoria Catanzariti
2013: Alberto Ghibellini
