Visiting staff and students

We host a range of visiting staff and students. For more details on how to apply, see the detailed information about postdoctoral fellowships, visiting fellowships and Erasmus+ schemes within the Centre.

2021-22

Visiting Staff

• Dr Alejandro Flores is a CSMCH-IASH Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History.  He holds a Diplom soziologe (sociology) degree from the Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include transdisciplinary, decolonial, collaborative research methods, sensorial and visual anthropology of memory, Cold War—counterinsurgency—infrastructures, and indigenous—ontological—subversions.

2020-21

Visiting Staff

• Dr Elizabeth Banks was a CSMCH-IASH Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History.  She is a transnational historian of the Soviet Union. Her research explores the Soviet past in a global perspective and integrates histories of Soviet actions overseas with critical transformations of the twentieth century including decolonization, globalization, technological and environmental change. She received her PhD from New York University and previously held a Max Weber postdoctoral fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence.

2019-20

Visiting staff

• Dr Kate Ballantyne was a Career Development Fellow in Contemporary History in the CSMCH for the academic year 2019-2020. Her research focuses on twentieth century southern student activism and free speech on American university campuses. During her time in Edinburgh, she played a key role in the organisation and running of the Centre, as well as pursuing her own research and teaching interests. You can find out more about her work by reading the autobiographical post she wrote for the Centre blog or by listening to her 'CSMCH Showcase' podcast interview. 

• Dr Kristoff Kerl was a CSMCH-IASH Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History. He completed his PhD in Anglo-American history at the University of Cologne. After his PhD, Kristoff was a research associate and lecturer at the University of Cologne and at Ruhr-University Bochum. Subsequently, he was a fellow at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, and he also held various fellowships at the German Historical Institute in Washington, at Harvard University and at the German Historical Institute in London. Kristoff is currently working on the emergence of countercultures in western countries such as the United States, Great Britain and Western Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. He was in residence from February to April 2020.

Visiting students

• Martina Reiterová was a Visiting Research Postgraduate Student in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and the CSMCH in October and November 2019. She is a third-year doctoral student at the Charles University in Prague. Martina has studied in Prague, Budapest and Paris. She is conducting research into the formation of collective representation at the turn of the 20th century in the Celtic countries under the influence of local revivalist movements. During her time at Edinburgh, she did archival work, particularly in the university special collections and the National Library of Scotland. 

2018-19

Visiting staff

• Dr Ljubica Spaskovska was a CSMCH-IASH Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History. Prior to her arrival, she was an Associate Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State-Socialism in a Global Perspective’ at the University of Exeter. Her research interests are in the political and socio-cultural history of internationalism. During her stay at the Centre, she worked on her project entitled ‘Comrades, Guerillas, Diplomats: Yugoslavia, Non-Alignment and the Quest for a New International Order, 1930-1990’. Ljubica is now a Lecturer at the University of Exeter. She was in residence from March to May 2019. For more on her work, see: 'Ljubica Spaskovska on 20th century socialist and non-aligned internationalism'
• Dr Claudia Stern was a CSMCH-IASH Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History. Before starting her fellowship, she had been a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. During her stay at the Centre, she pursued her research on the relationship between the experience of the Chilean middle class, gendered identities, and trauma from an economic, urban and political viewpoint. She was in residence from March to May 2019. 

2017-18

Visiting staff

• Dr Rakesh Ankit was the inaugural CSMCH-IASH Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History. He studied at the universities of Delhi, Oxford and Southampton, from where he completed his PhD in 2014. His dissertation was published as 'Kashmir, 1945-66: From Empire to the Cold War' (Routledge, 2016). During his stay at the Centre, he worked on a history of Indian Communism. Before taking up his fellowship, he was assistant professor at OP Jindal University in Sonipat, near Delhi in India. He is now a lecturer at Loughborough University. He was in residence from November 2017 to February 2018.

Visiting students

• Birgit Ampe was an Erasmus+ trainee and visiting postgraduate student in the CSMCH from March to May 2018. Birgit completed her Bachelor's and Master's degree in English Literature from the University of Ghent in Belgium. During her stay at the Centre, she helped manage some administrative tasks, as well as pursuing her own research on colonial soldiers during World War One using archival collections in the National Library of Scotland. She published a three-part series about her research on the CSMCH blog.