Every year, the International History and Politics Department hosts visiting scholars who make invaluable contributions through their specialisations, enriching our scope and deepening our expertise.
Abbas Jong received his PhD in Sociology from the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin. Following his doctorate, he worked as a researcher and lecturer at Humboldt University, Kiel University, the University of Erfurt, and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF). His work has focused on political Islam; Islamist movements in contemporary Iran and the Middle East; the history of the Iranian left and communist movements in exile during the Cold War; the global student movement of that period; and contemporary social movements in Iran. Since October 2024, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin, examining modernity, the concept of “reform” and the reform movements in modern Iran. Beginning in July 2025, he has also been a visiting researcher in the Department of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute Geneva, where he studies the history of Iranian left currents across Eastern and Western Europe—with a particular focus on Iranian communist parties in East and West.
George Severs is a postdoctoral researcher in the Gender Centre where he works on the FNS-funded project Race and Ethnicity: Sexual Health and Reproductive Experiences project, led by Prof Caroline Rusterholz. He is a historian of modern Britain specialising in histories of sexual health, sexual violence and queer activism. George is the author of Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) and the co-author of Reusing Oral Histories: From Archive to Analysis which will be published by Routledge next year. George is currently writing a book focused on the intimate history of Britain during its decolonising decades by placing sexual and reproductive health at the heart of the story. He is actively writing two chapters at the moment, each focusing on a different case study. The first looks at the British contribution to the International Biological Programme, an exploratory medical expedition to a remote mountainous region of Bhutan which took place between 1964-5.
Anna Ceschi received her PhD from the University of Cambridge with a dissertation on Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of situation, working under the supervision of Prof. Sylvana Tomaselli. She is the Assistant Editor of the Simone de Beauvoir Studies and one of the convenors of the Beauvoir and Marxism Research Group. Her research interests include modern and contemporary political philosophy, feminist theory, and the history of political thought. She is currently working on the Wages for Housework Campaign from a transnational perspective. Her aim is to engage with archival materials such as political pamphlets, flyers, and assembly reports held at the Archives contestataires through a philosophical lens. Her research starts from the feminist awareness that women’s politico-philosophical thought and labour often emerge beyond official written texts, challenging the canonical separation between theory and praxis and expanding the canon of political and philosophical thought through renewed attention to non-traditional sources.
is a legal historian who is currently on a visiting fellowship to the IHEID. With a decade of experience in trans and anti-caste movements in India, he is committed to producing socially engaged scholarship.
Gee Semmalar is currently working on his monograph on caste and gender deviance in colonial India.
Tripurdaman Singh is a historian and writer, and currently an Ambizione Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. He was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of London, and has held visiting fellowships at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, Fondation Maison des Sciences de L’Homme in Paris, and the University of Basel in Switzerland. His books include Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Nehru (William Collins, 2021; Editions de la MSH, 2024)) and the Ram Nath Goenka Award-winning Sixteen Stormy Days (Penguin, 2020; Bloomsbury, 2024). In 2024 he was awarded the Dan David Prize for ‘outstanding contribution to scholarship that illuminates the past’.