People

Organizers of the 2023 summer school
Prof. Dr. Theresa Gessler, Dr. Sophia Hunger, Prof. Dr. Denise Traber, Jana Boukemia, MA

Advisory board
Prof. Dr. Anita Gohdes, Prof. Dr. Malu Gatto




Prof. Dr. Theresa Gessler

Theresa Gessler is a tenure-track assistant professor for Comparative Politics at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). Before, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science of the University of Zurich and finished her doctorate at the European University Institute in Florence (2019). Her research interests are democracy, immigration and Central-Eastern Europe. She participated in the Summer School in 2017 and has since published and taught with computational methods, including webscraping, text analysis and machine learning.




Dr. Sophia Hunger

Sophia Hunger is a research fellow at the Center for Civil Society Research and is part of a research project on political radicalization and protest in Germany. She obtained her doctorate at the European University Institute, where she was involved in the ERC-POLCON project. Her PhD project deals with the impact of populist radical right parties on party competition in Europe. Methodologically, she takes a broad interest in quantitative methods, with a particular focus on text-as-data approaches .




Prof. Dr. Denise Traber

Denise Traber is an Assistant Professor of Political Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland. Previously, she was a senior research fellow (SNSF Ambizione) at the University of Lucerne, a senior researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, and a visiting researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Denise’s research focuses on party competition, representation, and political behavior in Europe. Her work appeared in Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics and Political Science Research and Methods among others. 




Jana Boukemia

Jana Boukemia is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at University of Basel. In her PhD, she analyzes how ethnic minority politicians convey symbolic meaning through the images they post on Facebook and Instagram. Additionally, she is currently working on a paper in which she uses a language classifier to detect uncivil replies to politicians on Twitter. She is interested in political representation of minorities on social media, text-as-data approaches and both quantitative and qualitative image analysis.



Prof. Dr. Anita Gohdes

Anita Gohdes is Professor of International and Cyber Security at the Hertie School in Berlin. She works at the intersection of international security, technology, and domestic contentious politics. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Zurich, and postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center International Security Program. Since 2009, she has worked for the California-based non-profit organisation Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics,  Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Nature Human Behavior, among others.  




Prof. Dr. Malu Gatto

Malu A. C. Gatto is Associate Professor of Latin American Politics at the Institute of the Americas at University College London (UCL). Her work explores questions about political behaviour, representation, policy-making, and gender and politics with a regional focus on Latin America, especially Brazil. Prior to joining UCL, Malu was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich. She has also held visiting fellowships at the Wilson Center for International Scholars and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research has been published at Comparative Political Studies, the British Journal of Political ScienceParty PoliticsDemocratization, and Politics & Gender, among others.

The Summer School was founded in 2017 by Prof. Dr. Malu Gatto, Prof. Dr. Anita Gohdes, Prof. Dr. Denise Traber, and Prof. Dr. Mariken van der Velden.