After completing her Masters studies in Germany (Institut für Philosophie und Anthropologie, Halle), Emma Barrett Fiedler was awarded a doctoral contract at Aix-Marseille University to carry out her PhD at IDEAS (Institut d'Ethnologie et d'Anthropologie Sociale). Her thesis, defended in June 2023, was entitled "Return to Nostalgia. Administration of legal foreigners and subjectivations in exile". Her work falls within the field of migration anthropology, dealing with what might be called "migratory" nostalgia, or the subjective experience of exile, largely exacerbated today by the new face of the administration of foreigners in Europe. Her research is moving towards a general anthropology of nostalgia, going beyond the psycho-affective consequences of migration: she is interested in its "stationary" forms, which do not require spatial displacement, refocusing on the relationship between subjects and the passage of time. Her research program for the coming years will focus on three "collapses" and lived experiences of disappearance: Germanic Jewish memory, the memory of socialist Germany in the GDR, and environmental nostalgia for Nature.

An associate researcher at IDEAS since October 2023, she has obtained several international funding grants (CIERA, IFRA-SHS, IC Migrations) in order to carry out her own current research project, located in Germanic space. Entitled "On the ancestors’ path. Returning, memory and nostalgia of Israelis of Germanic Jewish descent: Berlin and Vienna in perspective", this project is funded by a CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) research grant. As part of the French-German SALTO program of "strategic exchange and partnership for scientific excellence" with the Max-Planck Gesellschaft, Emma Barrett Fiedler will be attached to the Max-Planck Institute in Göttingen for the study of religious and ethnic diversity from November 2024 to July 2025. Her research field will take place in Berlin for the year 2024-2025 to come, in association with the Centre Marc Bloch.