New issue of static (4.1 | 2025) published
We are pleased to announce the publication of the new issue of static (4.1 | 2025), dedicated to the theme of cultural infrastructure. Its cover features a zine created during last year’s summer school — a reminder of the DIY and often dissident forms of cultural expression that circulate outside commercial or state-controlled channels.
In this issue, we explore cultural infrastructures in many forms: from Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop’s Atlantique as a “filmic zine”, to African schools of architecture, to art historian and gallerist Godula Buchholz and her role in linking South American and German art worlds. Artist fellow Işıl Eğrikavuk closes the issue with a reflection on dormancy as a quiet resistance to academic acceleration.
Read the issue online: 👉 https://static.ub.uni-muenchen.de
For print copies, contact: gdc@lmu.de
global dis:connect postdoctoral researcher Susanne Quitmann has been awarded the Prize of the German Historical Institute London 2025 for her dissertation “Reconceptualising Voice: An Exploratory Case Study of British Child Migrants (1869–1970)”, completed at LMU Munich. This recognition marks the third distinction for her dissertation, which has also received the Society for the History of Children and Youth Dissertation Award and the German Association for British Studies Dissertation Award.
In her thesis, Quitmann reconceptualises voice as an analytical tool to study marginalised people in history. Using the example of British child migrants sent to Canada and Australia between 1869 and 1970, she explores how they navigated and communicated their experiences and constructed new identities within highly asymmetrical power structures. Her approach broadens the understanding of “voice” beyond speech and writing, attending also to silences, music, and bodily performance as meaningful forms of expression.
The GHIL Prize is awarded annually for outstanding doctoral theses in German or British history, colonial history, or British–German relations. It carries a €1,000 award and is formally presented at the GHIL Annual Lecture. 
We are delighted to share that our former fellow Julian Warner (fellow 2024/25) has been appointed professor of performance and artistic research at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart (HMDK).
Julian Warner is a German-British artist and curator. Before joining HMDK, he served as artistic director of the Brechtfestival Augsburg (2023–2025) and curated the Festival der KulturRegion Stuttgart (2022). He has designed performances and festivals for institutions such as Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and Münchner Kammerspiele.
During his fellowship at global dis:connect, Julian co-organised a workshop entitled The Grand Method. Brecht without guarantees together with Prof. Dr. Moritz Ege (UZH). The event, held as part of the Brechtfestival Augsburg, explored Brecht’s notion of the Grand Method as a practical doctrine and tool for creative and political action under changing social conditions. In line with Warner’s curatorial vision for the festival, the workshop brought together scholars, artists and curators to reflect on what it means to act without guarantees in cultural and political practice.
We look back fondly on this riveting event and the fruitful collaboration that made it possible.
Congratulations, Julian, and all the best for this exciting next chapter! 
On Tuesday, 12 November 2024 (7:00 - 8:30 p.m.) the LMU’s public lecture series adressed the complex topic of “
In March Jie-Hyun Lim commenced his term as a fellow at global dis:connect. Welcome.
Jie-Hyun Lim holds the CIPSH Chair of Global Easts and is a founding director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University.
At gd:c Jie-Hyun will work on multilingual versions of victimhood nationalism as a conceptual tool to illustrate competing memories of victimhood in the postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung across Europe and East Asia. 
Our associated fellow Kevin Ostoyich is celebrating a major achievement: The documentary film Gary’s Letter, which he helped inspire, recently premiered in Cuxhaven and has already been selected as a semi-finalist at the New York Indie Shorts Awards. Even more exciting, the film has won the L’Eclisse Award at the Blow-Up International Arthouse Film Festival in Chicago, USA. 🎉
The film tells the moving story of Gary Sternberg, who was born into a Jewish family in Nazi Germany, fled to Shanghai in 1940, and later built a new life in the United States. Decades later, he discovers stumbling stones (Stolpersteine) bearing his parents’ names in front of his childhood home in Cuxhaven. This unexpected discovery leads him to reach out to the house’s current residents, rekindling a connection to the country he left behind so many years ago.
The film originated from a conversation between Kevin Ostoyich and the director, who has spent years exploring her own family’s history. Gary’s Letter is a powerful testament to memory, reconciliation, and the forging of new connections across generations.
Additionally, Kevin Ostoyich has just published a new article about Gary with the Spungen Foundation. You can read it here: