Emilia Henkel is a historian, doctoral candidate and research assistant at the Chair of Modern History/Contemporary History, Friedrich Schiller University Jena. She has been working in this position since May 2023 and has been doing her doctorate in history since April 2023.
She completed her studies in Peace and Conflict Studies (B.A.), Education-Culture-Anthropology (M.A.) and History and Politics of the 20th Century (M.A.) at Malmö University, Friedrich Schiller University Jena and Jadavpur University Kolkata. Emilia Henkel was a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation and participated in the Honors Program of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
Previously, she worked as a research assistant in the joint project “Dictatorship Experience and Transformation: Biographical Processing and Social Representations in East Germany since the 1970s” and in the project “Jena Schools in Transition”. Her project “Leben neben Stacheldraht” (Life next to barbed wire) was honored as part of the university competition in the Science Year 2022 - In demand!
Henkel's research focuses on the history of asylum and migration, the history of the GDR and the post-socialist transformation in East Germany as well as the history of experience. As part of her doctorate, she is investigating the emergence of a new (asylum) migration regime after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s along the former GDR border with Poland and the Czech Republic.