The Internal University Research Funding at JGU offers funding opportunities for active participation in meetings and conferences with your own presentation or poster. However, there are also many other reasons to go abroad during your doctorate – be it to participate in a summer school, conduct field research or collaborate with foreign researchers. This is what our Short Stays Abroad funding programme is all about.
From March 30 to April 5, 2025, thanks to the support of the GSHS, I had the opportunity to complete a one-week research stay with Prof. Dr. Stefan Radev at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, USA. The focus was on further developing my work with BayesFlow – a framework for Bayesian parameter estimation using deep learning approaches. We were able to discuss key methodological challenges and jointly develop new strategies for optimizing model training. The insight into the current development of the software and the exchange with other researchers who use BayesFlow in a biomedical context was particularly beneficial. The stay not only provided valuable professional impulses, but also the opportunity to develop new ideas for future projects. I am grateful for the support of the GSHS and am confident that the stay will have a lasting effect on my future research.
Funding from the “Short Stays Abroad” program enabled me to carry out a significant part of my field research as part of my doctorate. From 2703.2025 to 31.03.2025 I attended the conference “NatalCon 2025” in Austin, Texas, USA as part of my cultural anthropological field research. As part of the “NatalCon 2025” conference, I conducted participant observation and interviews within the so-called “manosphere” – a network of online and offline communities dominated by and targeting heterosexual cis men, usually led by influencers. The fieldwork allowed me to explore how influential online influencers link fitness, health and nutrition advice to traditional images of masculinity and anti-egalitarian and ideologies.
During my stay in Ithaca, N.Y., and New York City, I researched Isaac M. Rubinow (1875-1936) at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives (Cornell University) and the Center for Jewish History (NYC). He was a Russian-Jewish social reformer and social scientist who was involved in the development of the welfare state in the U.S. and, in the meantime, in Palestine. My doctoral thesis deals, among other things, with the question of the extent to which migrant knowledge influenced the emergence of the American welfare state. Rubinow plays a central role due to his own experiences with migration.
The archival work at the Kheel Center and the Center for Jewish History focused primarily on Rubinow’s personal papers and documents relating to his time in Palestine. The aim was to photograph the archive documents and thus make them usable beyond the trip and, where necessary, accessible through translators. In particular, the unexpectedly large number of Russian-language documents and their addressees suggest a circulation of knowledge between America, Russia and Palestine, which I suspected, but which has so far been scarcely considered in the secondary literature. Further documents provide evidence for my hypothesis that there were stronger links with Russian revolutionary movements than previously assumed.
The trip enabled me to complete the indexing of my source corpus. I would like to thank the GSHS for supporting this essential step in my doctoral project.
