Two scholars will join us

The »Justitia Center for Advanced Studies« is happy to announce its new post-doctoral fellows for the academic year 2024/25. They are excellent theorists, and we are delighted to welcome them. Justitia is a forum for political theorists and philosophers. It is generously funded by the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel-Stiftung and directed by Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. From October 2024 to July 2025, the fellows, who reside at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg, will be part of the Frankfurt academic community, especially of the Normative Orders Research Centre, and work on their individual research projects. The Center also regularly holds research workshops, conferences, and seminars.

Clementina Giulia Maria Gentile Fusillo conducted her doctoral research in political theory at the University of Warwick, under the supervision of Professors Andrew Mason and Michael Saward. She was awarded her PhD in 2021, with a thesis on the truth-related moral demands liberal democracy places on its members, as both citizens and citizen-representatives. Titled “On the virtues of truth: generativity and the demands of democracy”, her thesis puts forward two mutually supportive arguments. The first concerns a specifically democratic notion of truthfulness: beyond the well-established virtues of accuracy (the disposition to do what one can to acquire true beliefs) and sincerity (the disposition to say what one believes is true), this also demands generativity, a third virtue of truth defined as the disposition to turn what one knows to be true into something politically significant.  The second is an argument about democratic representation: looked at from the standpoint of the representative, this can be reconfigured as not only the all-important authorisation process that enables democratic government, but also – for those engaging in it – as an essential training in the virtue of generativity, and, therefore, as democracy’s own in-built device of civic education. Alongside the themes of her doctoral research, Gentile Fusillo also pursues a parallel project looking at the thought of Italian Christian-democratic politician and thinker Aldo Moro. Since the completion of her PhD, she has continued to develop various strands of her research, first as an Early Career Fellow at the Warwick Institute of Advanced Studies and later as a Lecturer of Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Sheffield. Her research has been published on Exchanges, Arendt Studies, and The European Journal of Political Theory.

Larissa Wallner completed her PhD at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich in 2023 with a thesis on Kant’s account of theoretical productivity. Her 2024 book explores the development of innovative thought and original aesthetic forms in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of the Power of Judgment, supplemented by his Anthropology, focusing on the open-endedness of normative, intellectual processes. Her current research project investigates the adaptive capacities required for a resilient democracy of the future. Influenced by Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Inc. and Habermas’ Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, the project examines the challenges posed by increased global information flows, their complexity, digital acceleration, targeted disinformation, and artificial intelligence in the public sphere. It questions whether these developments lead to the depoliticization of the demos, as diagnosed by Wolin, or to a paralysis, fragmentation, and disorientation of political action. The project seeks resources for democracy’s resistance to the collapse of politics into the economy by drawing on Arendt and Kant’s ideas on critique, regulative ideas, and the public use of reason for political judgment. Wallner’s broader research interests include theories of liberation, transgression, and emancipation in aesthetics, political philosophy, and efforts to critically transform Kantian thought for contemporary debates. She holds a master’s degree in philosophy, literature, and law, as well as a first state examination in law from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where she has also taught numerous seminars. From 2017 to 2024, she was affiliated with the Free University of Berlin and Humboldt University of Berlin.