Manfred Rommel Scholarship of the State Capital Stuttgart

The Manfred Rommel Scholarship of the State Capital Stuttgart is aimed in particular at young scientists in their doctoral phase to enable them to continue and/or complete a planned scientific work and publish it. The competition is open to all scientific disciplines and aims to reward particularly innovative scientific work. Applicants from other fields, e.g. literature and journalism, are not excluded, nor are persons on sabbatical.

Dr. Torben Giese, Director of the StadtPalais - Museum für Stuttgart, is chairman of the jury that decided on the awarding of the scholarship.

The expert jurors were:

• Detlef Esslinger, Deputy Head of the Home Affairs Department, Süddeutsche Zeitung
• Prof. Dr. Cathleen Kantner, Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart
• Marika Köpf, Filmaademie Baden-Württemberg GmbH
• Dr. Ulrich Raulff, President of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations

and for the municipal council:

• Marina Silverii, Bündnis 90/DIE GRÜNEN
• Luigi Pantisano, Die FRAKTION LINKE SÖS PIRATEN Tierschutzpartei

The Manfred Rommel Scholarship of the state capital Stuttgart was awarded to two scholarship holders for the first time in 2023.

Julia Hasselhorn from Goethe University Frankfurt am Main deals with the communication between sovereigns, institutions and the population in the period of crisis between 1789 and 1815 in her dissertation project "Between closeness to the people and fear of overthrow - a comparison of crisis and power communication in the period of upheaval (1789-1815) in the cities of Paris, Munich and Naples". "She has an interesting communal focus, especially as the comparison of the cities of Paris, Munich and Naples is a clever choice," said the jury. Hasselhorn is concerned with communication in a society in crisis mode.

In her dissertation project,Seda Rass-Turgut, Head of the Department of Social Affairs of the City of Osnabrück and Professor of Diversity and Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences and Culture, Hildesheim/Holzminden/Göttingen, examines policy change in Turkish municipalities under the influence of forced migration from Syria since 2011. Using a methodological triangulation, she is investigating the extent to which international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and city associations from European countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Germany contribute significantly to adaptation and change processes at municipal level in Turkey as part of development cooperation programmes. The grant will be used to communicate the results of the study via an international blog "Inclusive cities. Türkiye l Deutschland" and make them effective. The blog will serve as a resource for German and Turkish municipalities and as a platform for the exchange of concepts, methods and practices.

Vita Julia Hasslehorn

Julia Hasselhorn studied Latin, history, political science, public law and educational science at the University of Würzburg and the Università degli Studi di Siena. She completed her studies in 2020 with the first state examination in history, Latin and educational science. During her studies, she worked as a student assistant at the Chair of Modern History and the Chair of Modern History and History Didactics in Würzburg. Since 2021, she has been working on her doctorate at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main under Prof. Dr. Birgit Emich on the topic "Zwischen Volksnähe und Umsturzangst. Crisis and power communication in the period of upheaval (1789-1815) in the metropolises of Paris, Naples and Munich". She is supported by a doctoral scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Her research work was also supported by the German Historical Institute Rome, Campus France and the Center de Recherche du Château de Versailles. Her first publications in the field of regional history appeared during her studies on the migration of Huguenots in Lower Franconia.

Vita Seda Rass-Turgut

Dr. phil. Seda Rass-Turgut is a political scientist and was appointed to a professorship for Diversity and Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences and Culture, Hildesheim/Holzminden/Göttingen in the winter semester 2024/2025. Since 2012, she has been working for the City of Osnabrück, where she is currently head of the Department of Social Affairs. Migration and integration have been the focus of her professional and academic work for more than two decades. In addition to her career in administration, Seda Rass-Turgut has held teaching positions at the University of Osnabrück and Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences.

Her dissertation entitled "Policy Change in Turkey's Local Migration Regime" will be published by Nomos-Verlag (open access) at the end of 2024.

The theme of the Manfred Rommel Fellowship of the state capital Stuttgart 2020 was "Integration and Tolerance. This was also the preoccupation of the politician Manfred Rommel, who died in 2013 and is considered a pioneer of liberal integration policies, including the "Stuttgart Way," an exemplary integration model consisting of various interlocking measures.

Janina Leonie Selzer, a doctoral student in sociology at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, received the Manfred Rommel Scholarship of the State Capital Stuttgart 2020. With her research project "Putting down roots - How non-Muslim Iraqi refugees develop feelings of belonging in structurally weak cities in Germany and the USA", she convinced the expert jury.

Janina L. Selzer's research project started precisely at the topic of "Integration and Tolerance" and even went beyond it. The Stuttgart-born sociologist investigated and compared the feelings of belonging of non-Muslim Iraqi refugees in both Germany and the United States. To do so, she chose Bielefeld and Detroit, two equally structurally weak cities. In her case study, she explored the following questions: How can structurally weak cities and regions become a place of refuge for refugees? And how do these people manage to put down roots in a relatively unstable environment?

The state capital of Stuttgart has awarded the first Manfred Rommel Fellowship of 2018 to Dr. Felix Heidenreich. He works as a scientific coordinator at the International Center for Cultural and Technological Research at the  University of Stuttgart (IZKT) (opens in a new tab). His main areas of expertise are political theory, cultural philosophy, cultural policy, and business ethics.

The theme of the 2018 call was "Democracy and Social Cohesion." On December 10, 2018, an expert jury chaired by the then Lord Mayor Fritz Kuhn selected Felix Heidenreich's paper entitled "Der Anspruch der Demokratie. New answers to the crisis of representative democracy".

The mayor at the time, Fritz Kuhn, explained the jury's decision as follows: "How can the rift between citizens on the one hand and political leaders on the other be bridged? This is the initial question of Dr. Felix Heidenreich's work. The research project starts with the prerequisite for democracy: democrats. For democracy not only opens up a right to participation, but also formulat University of Stuttgart (IZKT) (opens in a new tab). His main areas of expertise are political theory, cultural philosophy, cultural policy, and business ethics.

The theme of the 2018 call was "Democracy and Social Cohesion." On December 10, 2018, an expert jury chaired by the then Lord Mayor Fritz Kuhn selected Felix Heidenreich's paper entitled "Der Anspruch der Demokratie. New answers to the crisis of representative democracy".

The mayor at the time, Fritz Kuhn, explained the jury's decision as follows: "How can the rift between citizens on the one hand and political leaders on the other be bridged? This is the initial question of Dr. Felix Heidenreich's work. The research project starts with the prerequisite for democracy: democrats. For democracy not only opens up a right to participation, but also formulates a claim and holds people accountable. Heidenreich's sympathetic project is well thought out and was able to convince the jury above all with its constructive approach."