Local Organizers of the 2026 summer school
Prof. Dr. Melanie Sauter, Hannah Rajski, M.A., Dr. Korinna Lindemann, Dr. Sandra Morgenstern
Organizing committee of the summer school
Prof. Dr. Theresa Gessler, Prof. Dr. Sophia Hunger, Prof. Dr. Denise Traber
Advisory board
Prof. Dr. Anita Gohdes, Prof. Dr. Malu Gatto
Former Organizers Prof. Dr. Theresa Gessler Theresa Gessler is a Professor for democratic political decision-making at the University of Hamburg. Before joining the University of Hamburg, she was an assistant professor at European University Viadrina and a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science of the University of Zurich. Her research interests are democracy and its backsliding, as well as political competition within democracies. She participated in the Summer School in 2017 and has since published and taught with computational methods, including webscraping, text analysis and machine learning. |
Prof. Dr. Sophia Hunger Prof. Dr. Sophia Hunger (University of Bremen) is a Professor of Computational Social Sciences at the University of Bremen and a visiting researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Her research focuses on protest movements, political participation, party competition, and political communication, with a methodological emphasis on quantitative text analysis and automated event extraction. She has published in journals such as Political Science Research and Methods, European Political Science Review, and West European Politics. |
Prof. Dr. Denise Traber Denise Traber is an Associate 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. |
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 Science, Party Politics, Democratization, 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.