Kissinger Center Welcomes 2021-2022 German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Postdoctoral Fellows

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), with the generous support of the German Federal Foreign Office, has provided grant funding for six postdoctoral fellows to undertake research and participate in related activities at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Through a regular series of high-level seminars, peer review sessions, and opportunities for direct engagement with senior foreign policy practitioners and leading scholars of statecraft and world order, the six DAAD Postdoctoral Fellows will focus their work on the program theme, "United States, Europe, and World Order." Each Fellow is expected to complete a research paper related to this theme during the period of residence. DAAD Postdoctoral Fellows are closely integrated into the Johns Hopkins SAIS academic community and will be affiliated with the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs. A division of Johns Hopkins University, SAIS is a global institution that provides interdisciplinary professional education to prepare a diverse student body for internationally related positions of responsibility; to foster research, scholarship and cross-cultural exchange; and to contribute knowledge, expertise, and leadership to the global community.

2021-2022 German Academic Exchange (DAAD) Postdoctoral Fellows

Dr. Colleen Anderson is a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She studies the culture and history of Germany, and her research focuses on how science and technology have shaped Germany’s roles in the wider world. Her first book-length project Undivided Heavens: Outer Space Travel in Divided Germany (under review) focuses on how East and West Germany’s space programs contributed to German efforts at internationalism during the Cold War. At SAIS, Dr. Anderson is working on a project on public healthcare and German internationalism from the late twentieth century through today. Dr. Anderson earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in History in 2017. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University from 2017-2020. Her research has been funded by organizations including the American Historical Association and NASA, the Smithsonian, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the DAAD, the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, and the Central European History Society.

Dr. Jonas J. Driedger is a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). At SAIS, Dr. Driedger researches transatlantic options for stability in the neighborhoods of Russia and China. He specializes in the causes of peace and conflict between major military powers and their less powerful neighbors, conflict-averting policy options of third states, the politics of regime survival, deterrence, “hybrid” conflict measures and security cooperation in international relations, with a regional focus on Russia and its relations to its neighboring states, Europe, and the United States. Prior to joining SAIS, Dr. Driedger was an Officer for Security Policy at the Institute for International Politics and Economics (Haus Rissen) in Hamburg. He earned his Ph.D. from the European University Institute in December 2020. In the same year, he was a Research Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, D.C. From 2018 to 2019, he was a Visiting Scholar and Alfa Fellow at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Dr. Payam Ghalehdar is a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). His research interests span US foreign policy, grand strategy, and the role of emotions in foreign policy decision-making. His first book The Origins of Overthrow, which claims that US regime change interventions have been a consequence of the impact of emotional frustration on presidential decision-making, is forthcoming in 2021 with Oxford University Press. At SAIS, he looks at the role of transatlantic emotional attachments in the founding of NATO. Payam obtained his Ph.D. from the European University Institute. Prior to joining the Kissinger Center, he was a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, a Research Fellow with the International Security Program in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Göttingen.

Dr. Katarzyna A. Granat is a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She holds a Ph.D. in Law from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Previously she was an Emile Noël Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center at NYU School of Law and a Junior Research Fellow and Assistant Professor (Research) at Durham Law School, UK. Her research expertise is in parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, and their institutional safeguards in the European Union (EU). She is the author of two monographs – The Principle of Subsidiarity and its Enforcement in the EU Legal Order (Hart Publishing, 2018) and The Constitution of Poland. A Contextual Analysis (Hart Publishing, 2019, co-authored with M. Granat). She has also published widely on national parliaments and the EU legislative process. Katarzyna interned at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, as well as the German Bundestag. As DAAD Post-doctoral Fellow Katarzyna focuses on how the EU’s rule of law crisis affects its ambitions in foreign affairs to promote democracy and liberal values across the globe and act as an exporter of the rule of law.

Dr. Veronika Müller is a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Paderborn in 2021, where she studied the impact of ideologies on conflict and violence. Her (very interdisciplinary) research interests span individual (rational) decision making, psychological well-being, belief systems, social welfare, conflict, and individual radicalization. Currently, she is working on her first book that aims to describe the role of fundamental human needs and belief systems in social and political conflicts, which will be published with Oxford University Press in 2022. Prior to joining SAIS, Veronika worked as a research assistant at the Chair of International Growth and Business Cycle Theory at the University of Paderborn and at the Chair of Political Psychology at the New York University, which was funded by the Fulbright Commission in 2018-2019. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Economics at the Paderborn University, during which she spent semester abroad in France and Japan and gathered experience in the industrial and non-governmental sector.

Dr. Shushanik Minasyan is a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Bonn in 2016. Her research focuses on the new security order in Eurasia and she is particularly interested in the nexus between power discourses with a view to the cross-border threats, energy security doctrines of Caspian powers as well as militarization of cyberspace. At SAIS, Dr. Minasyan is working on a project on the new geopolitical situation in the Black Sea region in order to identify the risks as well as opportunities for the Western world. Over the past fourteen years she worked in a large variety of interdisciplinary research context – starting with her time as a Postgraduate scholar of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Open Society Institute (OSI) as well as a Ph.D. scholar of the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation and her academic position at the Technical University of Darmstadt with a regional focus on Central Asia and Caucasus before joining the University of Bonn and then continuing her involvements as research assistant. She is also a member of the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS), a new interdisciplinary research centre of the University of Bonn in the field of strategic foreign, European and security research.