Fellows Fall Semester 2026

The CAS cohort for the fall term 2026 consists of two research pairs.

The project deals with distrust as a societal phenomenon. Distrust assumes with certainty that other actors will harm you, and perhaps even do so intentionally. Distrust can both express an attitude and occur as a social action. Furthermore, and this is to particular interest to us, distrust is used as a discursive tool that is deployed in debates around the relationship between individuals and between the individual and the nation state, in mediascapes as well as in fictional cultural products.

The project studies dignity as a nonpecuniary component of utility at the intersection of finance and politics. The starting point is the dignity hypothesis, which holds that contemporary political and economic disruptions are linked to a perceived loss of dignity. The joint prior work of Oliver Spalt and Richard Traunmüller shows that dignity gaps—defined as the divergence between expected and experienced recognition—are empirically measurable, substantial in society, firms and politics, and have profound consequences for life satisfaction, extreme voting behavior, and populist attitudes.