Awards Ceremony 2024

• The Jenny Gusyk "GENDER EQUALITY AWARD" 2024 in the amount of 3.000 Euro was awarded to the “Women and Non-binary Research Group” of the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences. The working group has initiated a self-organized peer mentoring that brings together female and non-binary doctoral candidates, postdocs and junior professors. The group enables members to conduct joint, interdisciplinary research by organizing events, writing retreats and regular meetings. The aim of the project is to network young scientists and strengthen them on their career path and is also recognized as a role model for other self-organized initiatives.

• The Jenny Gusyk "FAMILY-FRIENDLY LEADERSHIP AWARD" in the amount of 1.000 Euro will be awarded to two persons in equal parts with a sum of 500 euros each. Professor Dr. med. Norma Jung, Senior Doctor at the Clinic I for Internal Medicine at Cologne University Hospital, is being honored for being an outstanding role model over many years in the support of family-conscious working structures in the particularly challenging environment of medicine. As manager, she always keeps an eye on both the professional goals and personal circumstances of her team members and encourages and motivates women in medicine in particular to manage the balance between family and academic career.
  Professor Dr. Markus Stetter, Professor of Ecology and Genomics of Plants at the Institute of Plant Sciences in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, shows in his support for his team that the compatibility of family and excellent science need not remain an empty promise. As a multiplier for university-wide offers and information, a persistent initiator of concrete help and a sensitive and understanding listener, he creates a team culture free of fear and pressure, in which it is possible to be a highly committed researcher or employee and a caring parent or caregiver at the same time.

• The Jenny Gusyk "YOUNG SCIENTIST AWARD" amounting to 1.000 Euro is awarded for an outstanding academic thesis in the field of Gender and Queer Studies at the University of Cologne. The prize was once again awarded this year to two outstanding academic theses in the field of gender and queer studies. The prizes are endowed with 500 euros each. Tabea Odak was honored for her Bachelor's thesis »Das befreiungsfeministische Potenzial der mathetria Tabitha (vgl. Apg 9,36–43) im Horizont einer intersektionalen Bibelhermeneutik« at the Faculty of Philosophy. Tabea Odak's Bachelor's thesis is an impressively careful and convincingly revisionist philological analysis. By combining an intersectional theoretical framework with socio-historical contextualizations, which focus in particular on the role of women in the patriarchal environments in which the New Testament was written, previous perceptions of the text by (mostly “male”) exegetes are critically challenged.
  The second award went to Dr. Tobias-Alexander Herrmann for his dissertation “Nonbinary Gender Identities: Linguistic Practices in Russian and Czech” at the Slavic Institute. The doctoral thesis is dedicated to a topic that is often defamed in Germany: the tense relationship between gender diversity and social language regulations. Dr. Tobias-Alexander Herrmann examines this on the basis of two languages that have so far received limited academic attention with regard to this topic. The work impresses with its comprehensibility despite its complexity and theoretical range. In doing so, it enables a potential impact that goes far beyond the specialist discipline.