Since December 2022, Mara Albrecht is holding our “Initialization Scholarship Voluntariness”. For at least one year Mara will be part of our team and will be developing a project on violence, policing and voluntariness in various historical and cultural contexts.
Mara received her PhD in History from University of Erfurt with a dissertation on Political Parties and Political Culture in Lebanon during the civil war and the post-war period, published in 2017 (LIT). Mara is also co-editing an interdisciplinary volume on the spatialities and temporalities of urban violence (with Alke Jenss, ABI Freiburg, forthcoming 2023 with Manchester Univ. Press). Related to these research interests is also her habilitation project on urban violence and policing in the British Empire. Therein she analyzes the riots in Belfast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and in Jerusalem in the Mandate era from a spatiotemporal perspective. Before joining our group, Mara was deputy director of the Orient-Institut Beirut from 2019 to 2020 (maternity leave replacement) and a fellow at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies.
Our scholarship aims to develop new approaches within a history of voluntariness, and during this year, Mara will add new aspects to our existing projects. Her perspectives will link specific actors and their agency to global entanglements, testing voluntariness as a tool of analysis.
