Annika Funke received her bachelors and masters degree from the University of Trier were she edited records concerning Jews in the medieval court book of Hofheim, a small town in the rural surroundings of Frankfurt. Based on this reconstruction of a rural Jewish community she took interest in small town and village life and communal identity. Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Lukas Clemens at the University of Trier she works on Jewish political agency in settlements without independent communal structures. She is interested in the political networks, communication channels and argumentative patterns of Jews under territorial rule, focusing on the politically scattered landscape of Wetterau. She is an associate member of the Arye Maimon Institute for Jewish History, was part of a research group focusing on resilience as a heuristic concept for historical research and member of the Beyond the Elite research group at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.