Paula Simon M.A.

Dissertationsprojekt: "Between Fascination and Disdain? Serbia’s Roma within dominant discourse and society 1918-1945"

The research project „Between Fascination and Disdain. Serbia’s Roma within Dominant Discourse and Society 1918-1945”  examines the relationship between the minority of Serbian Roma and dominant Serbian society both in the interwar-period and in the period of National-Socialist occupation. The project aims to analyse how Serbian society as a multi-ethnic society had already developed ambivalent discourses and practices of co-existence, both of othering and of inclusion. To do so, the project examines processes of knowledge production on Roma within the fields of criminology, ethnology, anthropology, linguistics, and criminal biology as well as the dissemination of knowledge and discourses on Roma in newspapers and scholarly journals. The project aims to highlight similarities and peculiarities of the Serbian case against the backdrop of (Western) European discourses and practices, tracing the transfer of anti-gypsy stereotypes and knowledge to Yugoslav academic circles and dominant society.

To discuss the ambivalence, relationality and processuality of the relationship between Roma and Serbian dominant society, the project seeks to analyse how knowledge on Roma changed in reaction to processes of Romani emancipation, self-organisation and assimilation into Yugoslav/Serbian culture and identity in the inter-war period. It aims to shed light on questions of how dominant society dealt with the discrepancy between the images of the enemy produced and reproduced in (scientific) discourses and the reality they were confronted with in everyday encounters.

Finally, by including the period of National-socialist occupation and with it the persecution and genocide of Roma, the project aims at examining how the arrival of the German occupational apparatus carrying its own images of “Gypsies” as the enemy changed the constellation. The project seeks to examine how previous contexts of ambivalent co-existence affected local perceptions of Roma as well as the practices they informed and how they were altered in contact with the occupier's racialized images and or practices of discrimination and persecution.

Zur Person

• Seit Oktober 2023: Doktorandin im Graduiertenkolleg "Ambivalent Enmity", Universität Heidelberg
• Seit 2022: Doktorandin am Historischen Seminar der Universität Heidelberg
• 2021: Masterabschluss im Fach Global History an der Universität Heidelberg
• 2019: Auslandssemester an der Universität zu Belgrad, Serbien
• 2018: Bachelorabschluss in Anglistik und Geschichte an der Universität Heidelberg
• 2017: Auslandssemester an der University of Birmingham, UK
• 2013: Abitur an der Freien Waldorfschule Ludwigsburg
• 1993: Geboren in Backnang

Stipendien und Auszeichnungen

• Seit Juni 2023: Promotionsstipendiatin der Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
• Januar-Dezebmber 2022: Romani Rose-Fellow an der Forschungsstelle Antiziganismus am Historischen Seminar, Universität Heidelberg
• 2019-2020: Stipendiatin "Metropolen in Osteuropa" der Studienstiftung und der Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung
• 2017-2021: Stipendiatin der Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes

Beschäftigungen

• 2021-2022: Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft im Projekt "Die Vernichtung der Ortschaft Korjukivka im Gebiet Černihiv/Ukraine unter deutscher Besatzungsherrschaft"
• 2019: Praktikum beim Centre for Public History in Belgrad, Serbien; Praktikum bei Documenta in Zagreb, Kroatien; Praktikum bei YiHR in Sarajevo, Bosnien und Herzegowina
• 2017: Praktikum im Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg
• Seit 2015: Studentische Hilfskraft am Lehrstuhl für Osteuropäische Geschichte der Universität Heidelberg

Arbeitsschwerpunkte

• Historische Antiziganismusforschung
• Völkermord an den Roma in Serbien
• Minderheitengeschichte im Jugoslawien der Zwischenkriegszeit