Young Scholars

Lucy Benjamin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and is supported by a Fellowship from the British Academy. Her research is situated at the intersection of political philosophy, architectural theory and environmental humanities. A central theme of her work is repair - both as a material process and as a social and political concept. Based on the observation that repair is often more expensive than new acquisition, she examines infrastructural responsibility in a culture of “irreparability”, combining theoretical reflection with social practice.

Together with Rebecca Etter, curator of the “Repair” exhibition at the ALPS Swiss Alpine Museum in Bern, and Guido Brandi, architect and research associate at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Lucy Benjamin will discuss the challenges, limits and possibilities of repairing the world at the Young Scholars Award Ceremony on March 31 at 5:30 pm. The event will be in English.

Catherine Gibson is a lecturer in East European and Eurasian Studies at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu. She is author of Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (OUP, 2022) and from 2025 she will embark on a new ERC-funded project on the history of intra-imperial charitable solidarities in the Romanov Empire. She is also one of the co-editors of the public history blog www.peripheralhistories.co.uk.

Philipp Krauer received his doctorate from ETH Zurich in 2021 with a thesis on Swiss mercenaries in the Dutch colonial army (1848-1914). His research interests include global, colonial and knowledge history. He holds a Master's degree in History and Philosophy of Knowledge from ETH Zurich and a Bachelor's degree in History and German Language and Literature from the University of Zurich. Since 2021 he has been working as an archivist at the Staatsarchiv of the Canton of Schwyz. He is also co-founder of the public history project «zh-kolonial.ch».

Leandra Bias researches at the intersection of Political Science and Gender Studies with a focus on Russia. She did her DPhil in Politics at Oxford and recently joined the Institute for Political Science as postdoc and Co-PI of the Horizon Europe project UNTWIST. The prize ceremony took place in February 2023 at the Reitschule in Bern.

More about Leandra Bias

As a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern, she is conducting research on Political Patterns. European Printed Cotton Textiles for West Africa in the 18th and early 19th Century and a New History of Style. 
The award ceremony took place in November 2022 at the Bernisches Historisches Museum and the Grand Palais.

More about Chonja Lee