Andrea is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Kifyasi specialises in medical history and is interested in China’s medical aid to post-colonial African countries and medical diplomacy. He earned his PhD at the Department of History, University of Basel, in 2021. His latest journal article examined the effectiveness of exchanges of medical knowledge across the Global South using case studies of the Chinese-funded medical projects in Tanzania from 1968 to the 1990s.  

Neither “Saviour” nor “Exploiter”: A Historical Study of China’s Medical Assistance in Post-Colonial Tanzania

At global dis:onnect, Andrea is studying the history of China’s medical assistance in post-colonial Tanzania, particularly the implications of Chinese medical aid in the development of Tanzania’s health sector under the discourse of South-South cooperation. He’s exploring how China’s medical assistance reflected the Southern agenda of promoting self-reliance and lessening Northern dominance in medical aid and knowledge in the South. The ensuring book will touch on South-South cooperation as well as economic, political and knowledge entanglements in bilateral relationships among countries of the Global South.

Aglaya is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on European and Soviet modern art. She is the author Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2022), which received Modernist Studies Association’s 2023 First Book Prize. Her research has been supported by the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, the University of California President’s Fellowship in the Humanities, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the ACLS, among others.  

Off the Grid: Energy and Exhaustion in the Global East

As a fellow at global dis:connect, Aglaya will work on a monograph on how energy was represented in the socialist world, in particular the Soviet Union, as it intersected with the imaginary of the human body and anxieties about that body’s limited energies. During her residency, she will explore how the emergence of new materials and technologies (electrification, car manufacturing, stainless steel production, off-shore drilling) were understood, throwing into sharper relief the question of how the socialist body and the socialist environment should look and function.  

 

Arnika is an interdisciplinary scholar of Thailand working at the intersections of the country’s aesthetic and political modernities. She is the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema and Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong. She is currently a professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.  

Digital futures: Asian media temporalities and the expansion of the sphere of politics

Arnika's project investigates the temporal properties of the digital and draws the counterintuitive properties of digital mediation in relation to the dis:connectivity of a global gaze on Asian political spheres. It examines the temporal efficacy of features unique to the digital sphere and inquires into the counterintuitive ways in which contexts of political constraint shape and facilitate political expression. Digital futures thereby interrogates assumptions about the teleologies of progressive politics and investigates digital media across political fields and national boundaries in a highly globalised Asia.  

Christof is professor in modern history at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Before coming to Bern he held temporary professorships at Freiburg i. Br., Konstanz, Basel and the FU Berlin and was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2013-2015). His field of expertise include European history, global history and social and economic history. He is the author of, among others, Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World (2018) and co-editor of The Global Bourgeoisie (2019) and, recently, a special issue of the Historical Journal on Global Social History.  

Lost traces. Global dis:connections in the genealogy of European social history

At global dis:connect, Christof will work on a monograph on the relationship between German Anthropology and Folklore studies between the 1850s and the 1930s. In the late 19th century, many anthropologists expounded the similarities of “primitive” societies in colonial and European rural peripheries as a matter of fact. Such a joint perspective, however, became ever more challenged after the turn of the century when domestic traditions became the foundation of regional and national identities. This disconnection was sustained by distinct notions of temporality: colonial cultures remained to be considered “peoples without history” by contemporary scholars, whereas European folk culture was integrated into a regional historical framework. The project thus analyses what was described as “inventions of tradition” by European social historians on the one hand and the “othering” of non-European civilisations as studied by global historians and postcolonial scholars on the other within one field of analysis and theoretical framework.

 

Claudia studied Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and earned her PhD from the Technische Universität Berlin. She has worked as a lecturer of art history, and as an independent researcher and curator in Bogotá and has held fellowships, among others, at the documenta archiv in Kassel and, at the Leibniz Universität in Hannover. Her research interests and publications focus on garden history, modern art, and the intersection of migration, exile and art from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th century.  

Detours on the road/historiographic detours: Bogotá in the first half of the 20th century

At global dis:connect, Claudia is developing a project which focuses on case studies of some European, mostly German-speaking, artists and intellectuals who arrived in the first half of the 20^th century in Bogotá, a city that, unlike other South American destinations, was not a recipient of large migratory flows and was not very open or attractive to immigration. The project addresses their work and experiences, and analyses, with a decolonial approach, the relations between places conceived or considered as a ‘detour’ and hegemonic historiographical narratives.  

Shane is a senior lecturer in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on logistics, Marxism, and performance history. He has published widely on the political economy of art, including the book The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism (Stanford University Press 2024). Shane holds a PhD in performance studies from UC Berkeley and co-edited Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Bloomsbury 2019). He is also a member of the Performance and Political Economy research collective.  

Generative Refusals: The Blockade as Art Form in the Logistics Revolution

As a fellow at global dis:connect, Shane will write a monograph on how the art world has become entangled in the planetary mine of supply chain capitalism. In addition to detailing the ways that contemporary museums, galleries and theaters depend on rare metals and mineral resources, Shane’s research will survey the efforts of artists since the logistics revolution to blockade and sabotage extractive infrastructures.

Brian is Associate Professor of Francophone African Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on theatre and performance in the Francophone World, especially in West Africa and France. His publications include Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa, as well an interdisciplinary range of scholarly articles on francophone African literature and performance. In the 2023-2024 academic year, Brian was a Fulbright scholar at the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.  

Staging Extremism in the Francophone World: Performance and Radicalization in West Africa and France

Brian’s research project explores francophone theatre artists’ local and transnational responses to the rise of extremism in multiple forms and trajectories across the Francophone World. The interdisciplinary project considers aesthetic interventions as well as the effects of cultural policies and colonial and postcolonial histories to explore the possibilities and limits of the stage as a tool for preventing radicalization.

Renaud is a Professor of European History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. His research specialises in transnational history, with a particular focus on Britain, France and their oceanic empires. In 2019 he published The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford UP). He also recently co-edited Ordering the Oceans, Ordering the World: Law, Violence, and European Empires (Past & Present, Nov. 2024), with Jeppe Mulich.  

Political Deportation in the Indian Ocean

Between the 1780s and the 1820s, the Indian Ocean became one of the principal theatres of the global war waged by European imperial states, which also involved powerful regional actors. This project analyses the forced migrations of alleged sympathisers of the French Revolution between three main sites – French Reunion, Danish Tranquebar, and English-occupied Pondicherry – and some secondary ones – including Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, and St Helena. This research sheds light on the transformations of European oceanic empires, and examines the effects of transitions of sovereignty on governmentality and colonial societies at this critical juncture.  

Nadia is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project Lebanon’s Art World at Home and Abroad: Trajectories of artists and artworks in/from Lebanon since 1943 (LAWHA), based at the Orient-Institut Beirut. Her publications treat cultural politics, artistic practices and the circulation of knowledge, including The Art Salon in the Arab Region: Politics of Taste Making, co-edited with Monique Bellan (2018), and The Syria-Iran Axis: Cultural Diplomacy and International Relations in the Middle East (2013/2015). She holds a DPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony’s College, Oxford.   LAWHA examines the forces that have shaped the emergence of a professional field of art in Lebanon in local, regional and global contexts.  

Lebanon’s Art World at Home and Abroad (LAWHA). Trajectories of artists and artworks in/from Lebanon since 1943

At gd:c, Nadia is writing a book on LAWHA’s main research questions. Since the project relates context and artistic production at home and abroad, the question of connections and ruptures between these poles is an integral part of the analysis. By studying the nuances of artists’ migratory trajectories, networks and creation, she is analysing rather than presuming links and connections, paying close attention to the experiences of artists.  

Işıl holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a Ph.D. in communication from Istanbul Bilgi University. Işıl has worked at the Berlin University of Arts (UdK) since 2017 and was the co-winner of Turkey’s Full Art Prize in 2012. She founded the other garden, a research space that focuses on ecology, diversity, inclusivity and radical care in the UdK.   Işıl has participated in numerous international exhibitions and residencies and has published widely. Recent exhibitions and venues include Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, La Casa Encendida, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography (2022), and the 11th Istanbul Biennial.   Işıl joined global dis:connect as an artist fellow.  

Gezi Park Protests

Işıl’s past research has been on community art practices and creating new forms of interconnectedness among different communities in the context of the arts. At global dis:connect, Işıl will focus on community practices from a beyond-human perspective and will focus on artistic research as a process-based method for alternative knowledge production.