October 2024

Susanna Hecht has academic appointments in the Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She also serves as director of the Center for Brazilian Studies of the Latin American Institute. She is proficient in numerous languages and her publications focus focused on such far-reaching topics as migration, urbanization, the Amazon and natural resources in South America.

Tejas Parasher, assistant professor of political theory, has a joint appointment in the department of political science and the International Institute at UCLA. He is the author of “Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought” (Cambridge, 2023). His research explores the political philosophy of collective self-determination, political representation and statehood.

Gaspar Rivera-Salgado is director of the UCLA Center for Mexican Studies and project director at the UCLA Labor Center, where he is a member of the core faculty in the UCLA labor studies program. He directs the Global Labor Initiative with an emphasis on cross-border, worker-to-worker collaborations between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

Piano: Michal Friedländer

Bariton: Noam Heinz

Sopran: Alma Sadé

Piano: Cathy Milliken

Vocals: Jocelyn B. Smith

Lead: PD Dr. Kai Hinrich Müller

Moderation: Cathy Milliken, Kai Hinrich Müller, Karl-Heinz Steffens

Lynn Vavreck, UCLA’s Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy, is an expert on campaigns, elections and public opinion, with an emphasis on how candidate behavior affects voters. She has researched campaign advertising, survey methods, politics and the media, and how the state of the economy affects elections. Vavreck is co-author of The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy, which assessed why the campaign’s aftershocks will reverberate for decades to come. She is also the co-author of “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campagin and the Battle for the Meaning of America. Both books drew observations and insights from Nationscape, a wide-ranging weekly public opinion survey of the American electorate for which Vavreck is a principal researcher.

Alexandra Lieben is the Deputy Director of the Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations and an affiliated faculty member of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at the UCLA School of Law. A certified mediator, she teaches constructive communication, alternative dispute resolution, public dialogue, cultural competency, international conflict resolution, and community and economic development to undergraduate and graduate students at UCLA.

This panel explores the new challenges democracies on both sides of the Atlantic face from media and technological changes, with an emphasis on elections.

Moderator:

• Daniel Kreiss, Principal Investigator, CITAP & Professor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Panelists:

• Francesca Tripodi, Principal Investigator, CITAP & Associate Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science

• Guido Zurstiege, Professor for Media Studies, University of Tübingen

• Tobias Wilke, Assistant Professor of German, UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures

• Gregor Asmolov, Lecturer in Digital Entrepreneurship and Marketing, King's College London

• Jianing Li, Assistant Professor of Communication, Rutgers University Department of Communication.

This panel focuses on how social cleavages around race, ethnicity, religion, and immigration are weaponized in political narratives and elections.

Moderator:

• Ulrike Klinger, Professor for Digital Democracy, European New School of Digital Studies

Panelists:

• Meredith Clark, Principal Investigator, CITAP & Associate Professor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

• Jen Schradie, Associate Professor, Center for Research on Social Inequalities, Sciences Po

• Priscilla Layne, Director of the UNC Center for European Studies & Professor of German, UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures

• Sarah J. Jackson, Associate Professor, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania & Co-Director, Media, Inequality & Change Center

• Frank Baumgartner, Professor of Political Science, UNC Department of Political Science

• Robert Jenkins, Teaching Professor, UNC Department of Political Science

This panel examines the resurgence of authoritarianism and anti-democratic politics, with a focus on how media and technology facilitate these trends.

Moderator:

• Ulrike Klinger, Professor for Digital Democracy, European New School of Digital Studies

Panelists:

• Alice Marwick, Director of Research, Data & Society

• Johannes Gerschweski, Research Fellow, Department of Global Governance, WZB Berlin Social Science Center

• Jakob Norberg, Professor of German Studies, Duke University

• Christiane Lemke, Emerita Professor of Political Science and International Relations, UNC Department of Political Science

• Annett Heft, Research Project Lead, Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

This panel addresses the role of media in increasing polarization, disinformation, and division during election campaigns.

Moderator:

• Daniel Kreiss, Principal Investigator, CITAP & Professor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Panelists:

• Shannon McGregor, Principal Investigator, CITAP & Associate Professor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

• Frank Esser, Professor of International & Comparative Media Research, Universität Zürich.

• Pola Lehmann, Research Fellow, Center for Civil Society Research, WZB Berlin Social Science Center

• Stanislav Shvabrin, Russian Program Director & Associate Professor of Russian, UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures

• Radik Lapushin, Associate Professor of Russian Literature, UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures

• Chad Bryant, Professor, UNC Department of History

Freedom Forum Conference Center, Carroll Hall

A fireside chat on “Media Coverage of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: The View from Germany and the United States”.

With:

• Tressie McMillan Cottom, a New York Times columnist, Principal Investigator, CITAP & Associate Professor, UNC School of Information and Library Science
• Juliane Schäuble, U.S. Correspondent, Tagesspiegel Newspaper

Moderated by:

• Daniel Kreiss, Principal Investigator, CITAP & Professor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

RSVP here!

Jonathan Homola is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Most of his research deals with questions of representation and electoral preferences in Western democracies. Among his main fields of interest are xenophobia and support for right-wing extremism.

Marla Stone is professor of history at Occidental College and specializes in the history of fascism and in questions of dictatorship and genocide in the modern era. Stone’s work emphasizes the relationship among culture, politics, and the state in the 20th century. She has published on a variety of topics in European history, including Italian Fascist cultural politics, anti-communism, the contemporary far right in Europe, Italian Holocaust memory culture, and the continuities and ruptures between historic fascism and its contemporary manifestations. She has taught at Occidental College since 1994 and received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Sara Abrahamsson is a fourth-year student at UCLA studying Art History and French. As a culmination of her artistic and academic interest in political graphics, Sara is currently writing her senior thesis paper on the internationalist poster art of post-revolutionary Cuba. Upon graduating, she plans to continue working in museums before pursuing graduate studies in Art History or Art Conservation.

Amy Cabrales is a First-Generation fourth-year undergraduate student at UCLA, studying Sociology and the Russian Language. She is a Mexican-American, Los Angeles native born in Lynwood, California. Her career interests include cross-cultural education via museum work or language instruction and immigrant resettlement, while her academic interests include immigrant integration and self-identity across immigrant generations. She is anticipating returning to Almaty, Kazakhstan for the 2024-25 academic year to inform these interests and advance her Russian proficiency.

Elsa Coony is a fourth-year student at the University of California, Los Angeles double majoring in Global Studies and German. She has previously worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as both a docent and translator and is excited to join this year's council. In the future, she hopes to pursue a career in international development.

Biruke Dix is currently a 2nd year student at UCLA studying Applied Mathematics. He joined the Wende Student Council in 2024 and is deeply invested in the ever-changing properties of art as well as social habits. He hopes that he can create language and conversation that promotes the spread of cultural shifts and social justice.

Matthew Jones is a third-year PhD student in Claremont Graduate University’s Cultural Studies and Museum Studies program. His research currently explores how sites connected to authoritarian regimes function as pilgrimage destinations and what strategies states and institutions employ to reduce extremist attachment at these sites. He is thrilled to continue his training with the Wende Museum through this collaboration with the Thomas Mann House.

Emma Larson is a master's student at Columbia University's Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies. There, she focuses on the gender, social, and political history of Central Asia. Before starting at Columbia, Emma taught English in Kazakhstan with the Fulbright Program. She graduated from Williams College with degrees in History and Russian in 2021.

Zora Nelson is a current undergraduate student at New York University,  where she is studying Harp Performance and Media, Culture, and Communication.  As an east coaster born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she discovered the Wende Museum in the summer of 2022 and is honored to be a part of the council. With a passion for writing, Zora sees a future in storytelling to promote social justice.

Lexi Tooley is a current sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Political Science and Art History, minoring in Chinese Language and Culture. She is originally from Los Angeles, California, and attended the Archer School for Girls. Lexi has been working with the Wende Museum for the past 2 years. She looks forward to continuing the search for truth and examining the vulnerability of democracy through this program!

Dieter Gosewinkel is a historian and lawyer whose research focuses on European modern history and the history of citizenship, civil society, constitutional law, and European thought. From 2011 to 2021, he was co-director of the Center for Global Constitutionalism at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. He also held a number of fellowships, including at the European University Institute in Florence, the Institut d'études avancées de Paris, and the University of Oxford. He has taught at Freie Universität Berlin, Sciences Po, Paris, and others.