Dr. Sarah Nimführ
Postdoctoral Researcher
Sarah Nimführ has been working as a postdoctoral researcher in a Hertha Firnberg position in the Department of Cultural Studies since 2021. She researches, teaches, and publishes on collaborative knowledge production, decolonial theories and migration studies from a historical and contemporary perspective. Other research interests include de/neo/colonial entanglements of Caribbean music in the transatlantic region, Jewish cemetery heritage and Island Studies with a regional focus on the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. In her current FWF research project, she is working on transgenerational memory work of the Jewish diaspora in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. In the academic year 2024/25, she is involved in this project as a visiting scholar at the Center for Jewish History in New York.
Sarah Nimführ studied Empirical Cultural Studies and Educational Science at the University of Tübingen. She completed her doctorate with distinction in European Ethnology at the University of Vienna with a DOC Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). In the 2016/2017 academic year, she was a Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna. Her doctoral thesis „Umkämpftes Recht zu bleiben. Zugehörigkeit, Migration und Kontrolle im EUropäischen Abschieberegime“ was awarded the Theodor-Körner-Prize in 2019 and was published by Dampfboot-Verlag in 2020. Previously, Sarah Nimführ worked as an integration and education consultant in refugee aid and as a research assistant at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Vienna in an FWF project on anti-deportation protests. Since 2020, she has been a member of the editorial team of kuckuck. Notizen zur Alltagskultur and since 2022 she has been Vice President of the International Small Islands Studies Association (ISISA) and Associated Editor of the Island Studies Journal.
Sarah Nimführ has appeared several times on the Austrian radio station Ö1 on the topics of migration, islands and music and was featured as part of a video installation in the special exhibition „Auf der Flucht. 25 Objekte erzählen“ (March 2, 2024 - March 16, 2025) at the Haus der Geschichte of the Museum of Lower Austria.
Recent publications include the anthologies „Writing Together. Kollaboratives Schreiben mit Personen aus dem Feld“ (2023) and „Raum – Theorie – Empirie. Ein Arbeitsbuch“ (2025).
www.sarahnimfuehr.com
www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-nimführ
@sarahnimfuehr.bsky.social
ORCID: 0000-0002-6317-1419
