Tanja is Professor of Political Sociology, and a founding member and former director of research (2010-2014) of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute. Tanja was also a founding member and convenor of the 2017 Manchester Migration Lab, and currently convenes the GDI Research Group on Migration, Refugees and Asylum.

Tanja has recently completed a research project on the potential role of the business sector in refugee integration and humanitarian response. She has also just completed as Principal Investigator an ESRC-funded project on transnational lived citizenship and political belonging in the Horn of Africa. She is also developing new work with Prof Adriana Kemp from Tel Aviv on inscribing mobile lives into urban peripheries. In adddition, she collaborates with artists of refugee heritage to carry out work on lived citizenship through creative performance.

Biographical background:

Tanja received an MA in Linguistics and Philosophy (1991) at the Free University Berlin, an MSc in Development Studies at University College Dublin (1994), and a Ph.D. in Development Studies (2003) at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Over the past decades she has worked as a university lecturer in Dublin (1991-1993) and Asmara (2000-2001), as an education consultant in Japan (1997-1999), and as a journalist on development-related issues (1994-2000). She was assistant professor at Wageningen University from 2003-2005 with the programme African Women Leaders in Agriculture and the Environment (AWLAE), where she worked on the implications of the HIV/AIDS pandemic for rural development in sub-Saharan Africa. Tanja joined the University of Manchester in January 2006. Major themes of her research are (1) revolutions, rebel governance and new elites, explored for example in relation to the case of Eritrea in the book The Making of Elite Women: Revolution and Nation Building in Eritrea (2005); (2) patterns of global solidarity, explored in a case study from Mozambique in the book Legacies of Socialist Solidarity (2014), and the dynamics of celebrity humanitarianism (see the edited volume Visual Global Politics); and (3) global rights, explored in relation to refugee and migrant trajectories and the concepts of insurgent and transnational citizenship as forms of resistance and belonging.

Research Agendas

I have recently completed a research project on the potential role of the business sector in refugee integration and humanitarian response.  Thereafter, I was the Principal Investigator of an ESRC-funded project on transnational lived citizenship and political belonging in the Horn of Africa. I am also developing a new cooperation with Prof Adriana Kemp from Tel Aviv University on inscribing mobile lives into urban peripheries, and with artists  of refugee heritage on lived citizenship through creative production.

The major philosophical threads behind my academic research to date can be summarised under the slogan aspirationandrevolution and centre on three major themes: (1) Revolution and new elites; (2) Revolution and the quest for global solidarity; and (3) Revolution and global rights.

2019 - 2022

Co-editor, DSA/OUP book Series: Critical Frontiers in International Development Studies

2018 -

Co-Editor, African Diaspora

Co-Editor, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs

2018 - 2021

Board Member of the International Humanitarian Studies Association and Chair of its Working Group on Ethics

2012 - 2013

International Convenor, XV Comparative Education World Congress, Buenos Aires June 2013

2012 -

Editorial Board Member, Journal of Media and Communication Studies

2010 - 2020

Review Editor, Journal of Development Studies

2009 - 2012

Member of the Executive Committee, British Association for Comparative and International Education