Dr. Josefin Graef

Dr Josefin Graef is an interim professor of political science during the winter semester 2025/26, replacing Professor Srirupa Roy who is on research leave.

Dr Graef received her PhD in 2017 from the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, where she wrote her thesis on media narratives about the German right-wing terrorist group National Socialist Underground (NSU). Her first monograph, "Imagining Far-right Terrorism: Violence, Immigration, and the Nation State in Contemporary Western Europe," was published in 2022 (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right).

In addition to various teaching posts and work as a research analyst in Germany and the United Kingdom, Josefin Graef was a Dahrendorf Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin, where she researched the populist radical right in Europe. At the Aston Centre for Europe at Aston University in Birmingham, she was part of a DAAD-funded research project (2022-2024) on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on territorial politics in Germany and other European countries. In 2023, Dr Graef conducted research as a Visiting Fellow at the American-German Institute (AGI) in Washington, D.C., on transnational right-wing terrorism. Between 2017 and 2023, she was also co-convener of the German Politics Specialist Group of the UK Political Studies Association (PSA).
Her main research interests include:
• Europe and global West
• Right-wing politics, political violence and terrorism
• Political ideologies
• Narrative theory and analysis
• Life and work of the U.S. theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

Selected Publications:
Graef, Josefin. “Facing the World as It Is? On Irony and (Counter)Terrorism”, Critical Studies on
Terrorism 2024, 17(3), pp. 530-550.

Graef, Josefin. “Im Westen nichts Neues? Internationaler Rechtsterrorismus seit den 1970er Jahren aus Sicht einer kritischen Terrorismusforschung”, in: Handbuch Rechtsextremismus (online), edited by Fabian Virchow, Anke Hoffstadt, Cordelia Heß, and Alexander Häusler (Springer VS, 2024), pp. 1-16.

Graef, Josefin. “Understanding Right-wing Extremist Violence and Structural Racism in Germany: Why Stories Matter”, Periscope Paper Series, Vol. 3, Canberra: Konrad Adenauer Foundation, regional office Australia and the Pacific, August 2023.

Graef, Josefin. Imagining Far-right Terrorism: Violence, Immigration, and the Nation State in Contemporary Western Europe. Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far-right Ser., Routledge, 2022.

Graef, Josefin. “Telling the Story of the National Socialist Underground (NSU): A Narrative Media
Analysis”, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 2020, 43(6), pp. 496-515.

Graef, Josefin, Raquel da Silva, and Nicholas Lemay-Hébert. “Narrative, Political Violence, and Social Change”, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 2020, 43(6), pp. 431-443.

Graef, Josefin, and Raquel da Silva. “Statebuilding and Narrative”, in: Edward Elgar Handbook
on Intervention and Statebuilding, edited by Nicolas Lemay-Hébert (Edward Elgar, 2019), pp. 232-240.

Graef, Josefin. “Using Narrative Analysis to Explore Print News Media Stories of Violent Crime”,
SAGE Research Methods Cases in Political Science and International Relations, 2019. DOI:
10.4135/9781526473233.