Prof. Dr Christina SpÀti
Christina SpÀti is a full professor in the History Faculty at UniDistance and Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Freiburg. She completed her doctorate and habilitation at the University of Freiburg and in between was a visiting scholar at the Technical University of Berlin, McGill University and Harvard University. Since 2014, she has been the head of the study program and, since 2021, the dean of the study program "History Studies" at Unidistance. Christina SpÀti is also an affiliate member of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat Gan, Israel) since 2019.
In addition to working on her dissertation on the relationship of the Swiss left to the Middle East conflict and her habilitation on language politics in Switzerland and Canada, she has worked on various research projects on Swiss victims of National Socialist persecution; gender, antisemitism and Orientalism in Switzerland; language and identity politics, reparations to Swiss victims of National Socialism, and universities as social laboratories.
Christina SpÀti has served as a reviewer for various foundations, research funds, and scholarly journals, including the Swiss National Science Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), Berta Karlik Program of the University of Vienna; Berghahn Books, L'Homme. European Journal of Feminist Historical Studies; Language and Society; Swiss Journal of History; traverse. She has also been a member of various expert and steering groups, such as the SAGW Expert Committee "Fremdsprachenunterricht" (2015), "Confrontations au national-socialisme en Europe francophone et germanophone (1919-1949) - Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Nationalsozialismus im deutsch- und französischsprachigen Europa (1919-1949)" or "Zeitgeschichte Aargau" (2018-2022).
Teaching
Functions at UniDistance Suisse
Faculty of History
- Full Professor
- Dean
- Programme Director DE
Faculty Council of the Faculty of History
- Dean
- Full Professor
- Programme Director DE
Academic Council
- Full Professor
- Dean Faculty of History
Research focus
Currently, Prof. Dr. Christina SpÀti is conducting research on Swiss victims of Nazi tyranny, on the relationship between Swiss authorities and Nazi organs, and on the behavior of Swiss diplomats in connection with their support of Nazi victims.
She is also working with her research assistant Sophie KĂŒsterling on a research project on the emergence of conceptions of "race" in Switzerland in the second half of the 19th century.