Doctoral candidates

PhD of doctoral candidates

Funding period 2019-2020

Two candidates from Viadrina and two candidates from Paris 1 were selected for the 2019/2020 period:

Anna Maria Mechtcherine studied Law at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg from 2012 to 2017. She also completed an extracurricular internship at the Berlin Criminological Service, specialising in criminal sciences. As part of her ERASMUS-funded year abroad at the Université de Poitiers (FR), she wrote a comparative law thesis on "compétence personnelle active" in international criminal law.
Since spring 2018, AMM has been working on her doctorate at the Freie Universität Berlin, affiliated to the binational project "Criminal Cultures on the Continent", and is employed as an academic assistant at the Chair of Criminal Law, in particular European and International Criminal Law, at Viadrina University.

Her dissertation examines the participation of the potential victim of a criminal offence in criminal proceedings under German and French law, against the background of a conflict of interests between international and domestic requirements and the private interests of the injured party and the accused. The underlying method is the functional legal comparison. The two legal systems lend themselves to such a comparison not only because of their overlapping legal-historical development and the common EU legal requirements. The active and passive participation rights of the injured person, which in German procedural law are divided into various forms of participation, are bundled in the French Code of Criminal Procedure in a single legal institution, the so-called action civile, and extended by further powers.
In addition to the comprehensive legal comparison, the work therefore also examines the question of whether the French regulations appropriately resolve the existing conflict of interests and whether the resulting reform proposals for German criminal proceedings would be compatible with the German understanding of the law and the German legal system.

Contact: a.mechtcherine@gmx.de


Discipline: artistic practice and art sciences, economics, industrial economics, visual art

Barbara Portailler is an artist-researcher who, until now, has devoted herself to the relationship between art and society, and particularly to the artistic and economic practices of re-using / upcycling waste. PhD student in visual arts and sciences of art, she is A.T.E.R. (temporary statutory teacher and researcher) at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She teaches photography practice and the economics of photographic production. Since 2012, she is a member of the laboratory Institut ACTE, Paris. Also, since 2014, she is an artist-in-residence at Le 6b, Saint-Denis cultural creation and distribution centre. As an artist-researcher, she has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions of contemporary art. She joined the Centre Marc Bloch in June, 2019 as a PhD student associated with a fellowship from the "Pensés francaises contemporaines" exchange program of the Europa-Univesität Viadrina with the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Normalienne, a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, agrégée of Economics and Law and graduated in International Relations at the Graduate Institute of the University of Geneva, she worked for ten years in the fields of human rights and renewable energies, with as common thread the question of the commons. At the same time, she has received several awards for her work as a photographer and her work has been exhibited in various group exhibitions. In 2013, she resumed studies in visual arts and art sciences to focus her work on the interactions between art and knowledge. In 2013, his first work questioning the reuse economy, entitled "What's left is what is passed on", is sold several times at Christie's in Paris.

Her researches focus on the interface between artistic and economic practices. Her interest is: the question of the circulation of waste and the so-called new paradigm proposed by industrial practices of re-employment/reusing, put to the test of the artistic practices. More specifically, she is currently pursuing a PhD thesis under the supervision of Pr. Yann Toma, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, with the title: "Circular art. Artistic practices and economic circulations facing the re-use of waste ". This problem is explored by comparing her artistic practice of participatory reemployment and the economic and historical dimension of waste as a common denominator, with the other artistic practices of exchange in the history of art (Joseph Beuys, Robert Filliou, Tomas Saraceno ) and the sociology of art (Jacques Rancière, Edouard Glissant) and the economic circulation to work in the other practices of re-use of waste in social economy and solidarity and agro-economy.

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In the framework of her scholarship with  the programme "Pensés francaises contemporaines", she is collecting used pos-it notes and video interviews. They will be reused to create collective portraits in the form of post-it collage and video experimental documentary, to be shown in a personnal exhibition in the European university of the Viadrina in Frankfurt-an-der Oder from the 17th of June till the 10th of July 2020.

Here is the link to the instagram of her project.

Contact: barbara.portailler@googlemail.com


 

Funding period 2022-2023

Alysée Le Druillenec has been selected for the period from 1 June 2023 to 31 August 2023.

Alysée Le Druillenec is a PhD Candidate at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Catholic University of Louvain under the supervisions of Prof. Étienne Jollet and Ralph Dekoninck. She is currently a non-tenant teaching and research assistant at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne where teaches two lecture courses: on the one hand, art history historiography on the concepts of “poetics” and “hermeneutics”, on the other hand, religious art history in seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century Europe, transatlantic and transpacific evangelisation sites through the prism of theological hermeneutics.

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Her research develops and focuses on the concept of “christophoria” as it appears in a specific phenomenon happening in the seventeenth century: the rise and canonisations of several Christ-carrier saints such as Joseph, Anthony of Padua, Frances of Rome, Hyacinth of Poland, Cajetan, Felix of Cantalice and Rose of Lima.

Her survey concerns the popularity of these saints’ posture, to carry the Child Christ in their arms, as a phenomenon which causes are, first, the upheaval of beliefs that took place in the era of the Counter-Reformation, and secondly, a new relationship to the Christ Child and children in general in the secular family sphere. One of the consequences of these causes would have been to lead to a re-actualization of Christology, in which the Christ Child acquired a new centrality as it can be observed in her PhD thesis’ corpus.

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She published a book on St Christopher (Orep, Paris, 2020), and articles on Saints Joseph’s cult in France (Histoire de l’art, Paris, 2022) and Nouvelle-France (Études et exercices polysémiques autour de La France apportant la Foi aux Wendats de la Nouvelle-France, Montréal, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2023), the concept of Trinitarian Inhabitation according to Teresa of Avila (Perspective. Actualité en histoire de l’art, Paris, 2021) and devotional objects (Ornamenta Sacra: Late Medieval and Early-Modern Liturgical Objects in a European Context, Leuven, Brepols, 2022).

Before receiving the prestigious grant from the “Pensées françaises contemporaines” programme of the Europa-Universität Viadrina and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, her research has been supported by several institutions such as the Villa Médicis-Académie de France à Rome and École française de Rome (bourse Daniel Arasse), the Academia Belgica of Rome, the French-Dutch Network (Éole excellence grant), the Theology and Religious Studies department of Villanova University in Philadelphia, and the King’s College London (the Visual Commentary on Scriptures project). She is currently a guest fellow at the Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society and recently received the Young Research Award 2023 from the Fondation des Treilles, founded by Anne Gruner Schlumberger.

Her research project for the “Pensées françaises contemporaines” programme aims to demonstrate how “christophoria” is an operative function of the concept of “ground”, according to Prof. Étienne Jollet’s definition. To what extent do representations of Christophoric saints present them as pedestals, elements that highlight the Word made flesh? Christophoria as pedestal could thus be presented as a mode of representation of the Mystery of the Incarnation, and the different ways of representing this gesture would make her corpus of images a visual doctrinal discourse, participating in the fundamental theology of the 17th century. Christophoria would then introduce a discourse on Revelation, on faith, on the sources of the Christian mystery in its relationship with the divine Logos, highlighting anthropological, systematic, and biblical dimensions, notably through the figures of Christ-carrier saints.

Dr habil. Elsa Tulmets

Research assistant and coordinator of the "Pensées Françaises Contemporaines" project and the visiting professorship

Viktoria Mesecke

Student assistant of the visiting professorship and the project