Global dis:connect welcomes new fellows!
Today, our first five research fellows join the Kolleg. A very warm welcome to Christina Brauner (Tübingen), Ann-Sophie Schoepfel (Harvard/Sciences Po), Änne Söll (Bochum), Sabine Sörgel (Surrey) and Callie Wilkinson (Warwick)!
Christina Brauner’s research on cross-cultural diplomacy in West Africa, (dis)entanglement, translation, narratives of misunderstanding, and the history of religion has exposed her to the distinct academic cultures in Münster, Bielefeld, Berlin, London, Princeton, and her current academic home in Tubingen. Her work in global history is informed by a strong interest in theory and historical methodology, with a particular focus on the inescapable concepts of time and temporality. At global dis:connect, Christina is investigating markets in the border region of the Lower Rhine, where competition and borders both constituted markets as social institutions and dis:connected the subjects involved.
Ann-Sophie Schoepfel’s intellectual background covers History, Art History, Anthropology, International Relations, International Law, and Legal History along with stops in Paris, Heidelberg, Tokyo, Hanoi and Harvard. Her research on the colonialist implications of war-crimes trials in Asia as well as on Vietnamese migration in the context of the Cold War has earned her numerous awards and academic honors. Sophie’s current research at global dis:connect centers Afro-Asian voices — jurists, writers, and anticolonial revolutionaries — from across the French former colonial empire, as they struggled to reimagine state sovereignty and international law in the Cold War crucible.
Änne Söll’s work focuses on the art of the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly on aspects of gender, mainly masculinities. Other areas of interest are period rooms, magazines, photography, video installations and the art of the Weimar Republik, specifically the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). While at global dis:connect, Änne is reconstructing the lives of three Jewish art historians — all women — who were forced to flee Germany in the 1930s and went on to forge successful careers as curators in the USa from 1950s onwards. A key question is how the strategies employed by these female art historians bridge the gaps and/or dealt with the voids in their professional careers while trying to re-connect to the global world of art history.
Sabine Sörgel combines her passion for travel and dance with sophisticated, philosophically informed theories derived from critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and theatre. Through sojourns in Mainz, Aberystwyth, London, and Jamaica, Sabine has published on performance, post-colonial politics, global culture, and the social power implicated in various gazes. While visiting global dis:connect, Sabine is researching how public performances over the last decade have invoked images of race, identity, rights, history, and memory.
Callie Wilkinson studies the dramatic expansion of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its sociocultural impact at home and abroad. In previous research projects conducted at Cambridge and the University of Warwick, she has examined how the idea of indirect rule was contested within the British East India Company as well as the contemporary debates on the extent to which information about the Company should be disseminated to the public. At global:disconnect, Callie is investigating how Company soldiers’ testimony affected broader discourses about the Company’s military operations in an age before professional war correspondents.