The Department welcomes Prof. David Stradling (University of Cincinnati), who, as a Senior Fellow at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities in the Winter Term of 2026/2027, will also be affiliated to the Department of Anglophone Studies. His tandem partners are Prof. Jens Martin Gurr, Department of Anglophone Studies, UDE, and Prof. Thorsten Wiechmann, Faculty of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund University. David Stradling is the Zane L. Miller Professor of Urban History at the University of Cincinnati (USA), where he has a joint appointment in the Department of History and the School of Environment and Sustainability. 

His fellowship project "Industrial Heritage, Shifting Meanings, and the Ruhr Area’s Wastescapes" examines the history and changing meanings of waste disposal sites in the Ruhrgebiet, especially coal mine tailings piles, steel mill slag heaps, and municipal and industrial waste landfills. It looks beyond the infrastructure of industrial production – the mills, mines, and coking plants – and considers the infrastructure of disposal. Many former sites of production have become museums or in some other way celebrate industrial heritage, and collectively they have come to define the new green Ruhr area. 

Through the UDE Postdoc Seed Funding scheme, the University of Duisburg-Essen supports outstanding research projects of early career researchers. In the 41st funding round, two researchers from the fields of engineering and the humanities are receiving a total of 49,620 euros to further develop their projects and lay the foundations for future applications for third-party funding.

Anxiety is not only one of the most common mental health issues worldwide today – it also played a defining role in the emergence of the colonial world order in the early modern period. In her project ‘Uneasy Encounters: Anxiety in the Colonial Archive, 1492–1740’, Dr Sonja Pyykkö (Faculty of Humanities, Anglophone Studies) investigates anxiety as an epistemic emotion that shaped how colonial subjects understood themselves in relation to each other and their environment. The project combines the history of emotions with postcolonial literary and cultural studies and opens up new perspectives on colonial systems of knowledge (grant amount: €30,000).

Both the increasingly globalized job market and the continuous advancement of academia require graduates from research-focused master programmes with competencies in more than one culture and language. By guiding students towards independent, competitive research projects and by teaching exclusively in English, students’ intercultural competencies (esp. in terms of Anglophone Popular Culture) as well as their problem-solving skills are advanced and strengthened. Since organised thinking and theoretically informed approaches to complex problems  are necessary for both areas, the MA programme prepares students for a career in the academia as well as the job market beyond the university. Read more