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.  

Claiton is an associate professor of history at the Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul (UFFS), Brazil, with a PhD in the history of science. In 2023, he published The Making of Modern Agriculture: Nelson Rockefeller’s American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) in Latin America (1946-1968), addressing U.S. private diplomacy during the Cold War. He also co-edited The Age of the Soybean (White Horse Press, 2022) with Claudio de Majo.

Towards a Soyacene: connecting soybean narratives of crists and change in Asia, European Union and Latin America

At global dis:connect, Claiton is exploring soybean production and exports as a fundamental dis:connectivity in globalisation, with a focus on political and socioenvironmental aspects. While historiography on the topic approaches these experiences of technological innovation and deforestation in a disconnected way, Claiton is proposing a transdisciplinary ethno-historical approach, connecting global experiences and arguing that the detours in this process (cheating, smuggling of inputs, etc.) are fundamental, not exceptional, parts of the process.