Janina Selzer

Following her training as an interdisciplinary scholar at the University of Chicago,and the University of Cambridge, UK, Selzer received her Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her dissertation, a comparative, multi-methods study of Iraqi refugees in Bielefeld, Germany, and Detroit, Michigan, investigates the ways in which forcibly displaced individuals develop a sense of belonging in post industrial cities.

More generally, Selzer is interested in the ways in which ethnoracial and gender inequalities become inscribed in urban space and how boundaries are constantly contested and redefined – spatially as well as symbolically. She was the 2021/2022 recipient of the Manfred-Rommel-Stipendium der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart and the 2022/2023 recipient of the Carell Dissertation Fellowship by The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies and metropolitics.

Select Publications

Selzer, Janina L. 2021. “Constructing a Geography of Trauma: Nation-Building and the Convergence of Feminist and Far-Right Anti-Refugee Discourses in Germany.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45(11): 2266-2288.

Soyer, Michaela und Selzer, Janina L. 2021. “‘I wanna be somebody by the time I turn 25’ – Narratives of Pathways into Crime and Reentry: Expectations among Young Men in Germany and the United States.” Pp. 165-182 in The Palgrave International Handbook of Youth Imprisonment, edited by A. Cox and L. Abrams. London: Palgrave Macmillan 

Appointed to the Faculty

Educational Background

Ph.D., City University of New York
M.Phil., City University of New York,
M.A., University of Cambridge
M.A., University of Chicago
B.A., University of Cambridge