We are happy to announce that this year three Elise Richter Fellows have been elected into the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). Anaïs Angelo, Lisa Isola, and Sandra Müller were welcomed to the ÖAW on May 13th. The Young Academy currently consists of 63 excellent researchers who were elected on the basis of acquired important research awards and fellowships. One main aim of the Young Academy is to support innovative research and strengthen young researchers. During the 8 years of their membership Anaïs, Lisa, and Sandra now have the opportunity to actively contribute to the many interdisciplinary projects of the Young Academy.
Anaïs Angelo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of African Studies, University of Vienna. Born in France, she graduated in political sciences (Sciences Po Paris), specialized in African Studies (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), and completing her Ph.D. in history (European University Institute, Florence). Her first book, Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years (Cambridge University Press, 2020), tells the history of presidential powers in postcolonial Kenya. She is currently writing on the struggles of the first women who campaigned for a parliamentary seat in Kenya, in the 1960s-1970s, a time when politics remained an essentially male field.
Lisa Isola is a legal scholar with research interests in Roman Law and (Ancient) Legal History on the one hand, and in current Civil Law and Comparative Law on the other. She studied law at the University of Vienna, where she started her academic career as a university assistant (prae-doc) in 2010. In the following years, research stays took her to the Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Harvard University, the Università di Sapienza in Rome, and to the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. In October 2014, she completed her doctorate with a thesis on “Venire contra factum proprium”, which was awarded the DocAward 2015 of the University of Vienna and the Premio speciale “Henryk Kupiszewski” 2019 of the Centro Romanistico Internazionale Copanello. After her first postdoctoral position at Johannes Kepler University Linz (2015–2019), she has been conducting her project on “Conversion of Testamentary Dispositions in Classical Roman Law” as holder of a Hertha Firnberg position at the University of Vienna since 2019 and was also appointed examiner for “Roman Law and the Civilian Traditions” in the interdisciplinary module exam I, “European and International Foundations of Law” of the diploma programme in law. In 2021, she was awarded an Elise Richter Grant for the research project “The, Agreement in rem‘ in the System of Causal Tradition”.
Sandra Müller is an Elise Richter Fellow at TU Wien in the Institute of Discrete Mathematics and Geometry. Her research focuses on Set Theory, a specialization of Mathematical Logic. She became fascinated with inner model theory at the beginning of her time as a doctoral student in Münster (Germany). The fact that the independence phenomenon occurs for easily definable notions, such as determinacy axioms, inspired her to learn all she could about it. This is how she started working on the connections between large cardinals and determinacy, and even to this day, the hope of bringing new facts to light concerning this mysterious and intriguing connection is a primary motivating factor in her research. With the support of her L’Oréal Austria Fellowship and her FWF Elise Richter Fellowship, she was recently able to achieve a breakthrough in this area: Sandra proved Sargsyan’s Conjecture on the large cardinal strength of determinacy when all sets are universally Baire.