Doctoral Researcher Paula Simon
Paula received her B.A. in History and English Studies from the University of Heidelberg. During her undergraduate studies, she spent a semester abroad at the University of Birmingham, UK and at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. She graduated with distinction from the University of Heidelberg with a M.A. in Global History. Her thesis focused on the national socialist genocide of Roma in Niš, Serbia. In 2022, she began writing her doctoral thesis as a Romani Rose fellow at the Research Center Antigypsyism in Heidelberg and has been a fellow of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes since 2023. She is part of the research team “Yugoslavia” of the “Encyclopaedia of the Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe”.
Her research interests include minority history, historical Antigypsyism research, the history of the Second World War and the Roma Genocide in Yugoslavia.
Her PhD project examines the relationship between Serbian Roma and dominant society in the interwar-period and under national socialist occupation and aims at analyzing Antigypsyism as one example of ambivalent enmity. It sets out to investigate how Serbian society developed ambivalent discourses on the minority, discursively rendering them inner-societal strangers of the nation-building project while integrating them into civil and religious structures of the newly emerging state. Situated primarily in the research field “Knowing the Enemy”, the project examines ambivalences arising from knowledge production in contexts of conflictual transculturation. To explore the relationality and processualism of the relationship between Roma and Serbian dominant society, the project traces how local knowledge about Roma changed in response to Romani emancipation, self-organization, and assimilation into Yugoslav culture during the interwar period. The project aims to highlight similarities and peculiarities of the Yugoslavian case compared to Western European discourses and developments. It traces the transfer of antigypsyist knowledge to Yugoslav academic circles and society, situating the case within discourses of Othering and racialization of the time. By including the period of National-socialist occupation and the persecution and genocide of Roma, the project aims at examining how local perceptions of Roma were altered in contact with the occupier’s racialized images of “Gypsies” as internal enemies and with practices of discrimination and persecution.
