Jozef Bátora is full professor at the Department of Political Science, Comenius University in Bratislava. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Oslo (2006). His work experience includes positions as associate professor and director at the Institute of European Studies and International Relations at Comenius University (2009 – 2015), visiting professor at The Europe Center, FSI, Stanford University (2013),  research fellow at the Institute for European Integration Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (2006 – 2009), senior researcher at ARENA – Centre of European Studies at the University of Oslo (2006), and visiting scholar at Scancor, Stanford University (2003 – 2004). His research interests encompass international institutions and their change, organization theory, diplomacy, EU foreign policy, EU governance and security. He has published in a number of leading peer reviewed journals including Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Common Market Studies, West European Politics, International Relations, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and Cambridge Review of International Affairs. In the period 2012-2015, he served as coordinating editor of Journal of International Relations and Development (www.palgrave-journals.com/jird). His latest book is The European External Action Service: European Diplomacy Post-Westphalia? (Palgrave 2015).

Andreas Kilcher is professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich. Kilcher is a prominent scholar of German-Jewish literature and culture, Kabbalah, and the European tradition of esotericism. He has written and edited a range of publications on the encounters between European and Jewish cultures from the sixteenth century through the present, with a focus on the twentieth century. His publications include Geteilte Freude: Schiller-Rezeption in der jüdischen Moderne (Munich, 2006), biographies of the writers Franz Kafka (Frankfurt, 2008) and Max Frisch (Berlin 2011) and numerous articles on German-Jewish literature, Kabbalah in modern Europe, and the relationship between knowledge and literature. Kilcher’s current project includes collaboration with colleagues at Stanford on the divergent constructions of Jewish ethnography in German-speaking and Russian-speaking territories. He was nominated by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Europe Center.

Masoumeh is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Siegen in Germany. She completed her “1. Staatsexamen” degree (equivalent to Master of Education) in 2008 in Political Science, German Language and Literature Studies from the Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany.

Her PhD research, which is funded by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, is focused on the political and media representation of Muslims in the context of the German Islam Conference (GIC). In her dissertation, she analyzes the GIC at the political and media level in terms of where essential indicators of the success of the deliberative committee can be found. The guiding questions in her studies are: Who is “allowed” to speak for Muslims, and how are Muslim representatives selected?

As a Visiting Student Researcher at the Europe Center and the Department of Political Science from July 15^th to October 15^th, Masoumeh will study the transatlantic perspective of the German Islam Conference.