Monica is senior professor art history at the University of Heidelberg, and distinguished professor of the arts and humanities at Shiv Nadar University. She has written on transculturation and the disciplinary practices of art history in South Asia, the history of visuality in early modern South Asia, heritage and architectural histories. Her latest book Can Art History be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery received the Opus Magnum award of the Volkswagen Foundation. She also received the Meyer-Struckmann Prize and the 2024 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award of the CAA.   Monica joined global dis:connect funded by the Munich Centre for Global History.

What, where, when was art? The travails of a global context 

While the endlessly proliferating, English-language term art is ubiquitous in several contexts, it has also generated contestation, such as over the question of what distinguishes art from religious objects. My project investigates the linguistic and historical negotiations the modern concept of art undergoes in South Asia after disconnecting from its European moorings. By combining transculturation with the insights of global dis:connections, it looks beyond hybridity and assimilation to make sense of detours and frictions, to understand the tensions between connectivity and difference.

I am an economic and historical geographer and a professor of economic geography and sustainability research at the LMU Munich. I research sustainability issues related to resource-based economies, manufacturing and business networks. I’ve written The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830-1910 (2012) and, with Andreas Dix, edited Trading Environments: Frontiers, Commercial Knowledge and Environmental Transformation, 1750-1990 (2016). Currently, I focus on Europe’s blue economy and the relevance of deglobalisation to historical research.   Gordon joined global dis:connect funded by the LMU.

Conceptualizing Deglobalisation

Scholars are conceptualising deglobalisation as a process as world trade declines, and wars and disruptions challenge trade. Economic geographers propose ‘recoupling’, ‘decoupling’ and even ‘slowbilisation’, but there is a danger that in claiming a new counter-dynamic to globalisation, they will underestimate absences, detours and interruptions as persistent features of globalisations. What are the implications of absences, detours and interruptions for conceptualizing deglobalisation?