In
News
Judd C. Kinzley from the University of Wisconsin-Madison joined global dis:connect in early July.
Judd Kinzley is a professor of modern Chinese history. His research treats borderlands, materiality and natural resources. He is currently working on the transnational exchange of Chinese raw materials for cash, weapons and industrial goods during World War II. This work reveals the transnational networks that developed to finance, produce and transport such resources. These trans-Pacific networks channelled objects in both directions during the war and served as the blueprint of a new postwar international order.
His project at gd:c focuses on the legacies of Allied wartime oil exports to China , the Middle East, SE Asia, the US and the European powers together.
Continue Reading
Judd C. Kinzley commences fellowship at global dis:connect
Judd C. Kinzley from the University of Wisconsin-Madison joined global dis:connect in early July.
Judd Kinzley is a professor of modern Chinese history. His research treats borderlands, materiality and natural resources. He is currently working on the transnational exchange of Chinese raw materials for cash, weapons and industrial goods during World War II. This work reveals the transnational networks that developed to finance, produce and transport such resources. These trans-Pacific networks channelled objects in both directions during the war and served as the blueprint of a new postwar international order.
His project at gd:c focuses on the legacies of Allied wartime oil exports to China , the Middle East, SE Asia, the US and the European powers together.
Continue Reading
19 September 2023
A warm welcome to our new guest Michael Goebel who joins global dis:connect in early September.
In September Ifeoluwa Aboluwade commenced her term as a fellow at global dis:connect. Welcome.
Ifeoluwa Aboluwade is a literary scholar with a background in imperial and literary history, early modern English theatre, critical digital humanities, (trans)cultural translation and adaptation, black diaspora studies, postcolonial literary criticism, and gender and intersectionality. She works at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence and is a lecturer at the University of Bayreuth. Ifeoluwa has received many international awards and fellowships, such as Fulbright and DAAD scholarships, most recently receiving the Shakespeare Association of America-Folger Shakespeare Library Short Term Fellowship (2022/2023).
At gd:c she is investigating the histories, patterns and genealogies (dis)connecting Shakespearean drama through topoi of trickster and warrior. 
In early July, art historian Sabrina Moura joined global dis:connect as a new fellow. Welcome to Munich, Sabrina!
Sabrina Moura is a teacher, researcher and curator from Brazil. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Campinas. She authored Arqueologia da Criação [Archeology of Creation, 2022] — a book on the work of Brazilian artist Rossini Perez — and edited Southern Panoramas: Perspectives for other geographies of thought (2015), which presents historical and artistic perspectives on the Global South. Her work has featured in Mousse Magazine, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, Stedelijk Studies Journal, African Art, Critical Internventions, 3rd Text Africa, among others.
At global dis:connect Sabrina is developing Cabinet Exotica Performing Absent Agencies from the Dawn of Natural Sciences, a project that focuses on contemporary visual and performative strategies. 
Nic Leonhardt from the University of Cologne joined global dis:connect in early July.
Nic Leonhardt is a theatre scholar and writer commenting on global theatre history; media, popular and visual cultures; and archiving and curating theatrical history. She has served as a senior researcher and fellow in multiple projects. Her latest monograph, Theatre Across Oceans. Mediators of Transatlantic Exchange (1890-1925), was published in 2021. She edits Global Theatre Histories and created the theatre history podcast Theatrescapes.
Nic is co-president of 
A warm welcome to our new guest Ross Truscott who joins global dis:connect in early June.
In April, historian Roii Ball commenced his term as a fellow at global dis:connect. Welcome, Roii!
Roii Ball is a social historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany and Central Europe and their colonial entanglements. He is a postdoctoral lead researcher at the Religion and Politics Cluster of Excellence at the University of Münster. Ball earned his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021 with a dissertation on the social dynamics and bureaucratic practices of German colonisation in the Polish provinces of Prussia before WWI (Advisor: David Sabean).
Ball’s work focuses on family and kinship to explore histories of colonisation and their intersection with empire-making and nation-making. His research interests include the history of knowledge, history of childhood, environmental history, and digital history. He has held fellowships at the University of Cologne, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, and the Leibnitz Institute for European History in Mainz. During 2023 and 2024, he will also be a visiting research fellow at global dis:connect. 
A warm welcome to our new guest Cathrine Bublatzky who joins global dis:connect in early April.
Cathrine Bublatzky is a media anthropologist and senior lecturer at the University of Tübingen.
She was formerly assistant professor at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies.
She researches diaspora and exile, archives, visual and digital media cultures, photography, art, activism, and the aesthetics and politics of belonging throughout Europe, South Asia and the Middle East.
Cathrine has been speaker of the DFG Network Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents (2018–2022) and author of Along the Indian Highway: An Ethnography of an International Travelling Exhibition, a monograph published by Routledge.
Her project Contemporary Photography as Cultural Praxis of Iranians in the European Diaspora, which she will continue at global dis:connect, was awarded a scholarship by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation.
Concept and organisation by Hanni Geiger and Tom Menger, Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, LMU, Munich.
Presenters include Florian Bachmeier and Eckehard Pistrick, Constance de Gourcy, Celeste Ianniciello and Renata Poljak. Participants are also invited to attend an evening lecture by Eva Mayer and Eran Schaerf taking place at the centre on 26 July.
The two-day workshop hosted by global dis:connect intends to explore the relationship between the global trajectories of illiberal regimes and their theatre cultures following the Cold War. The war in the Ukraine has accentuated the globalising propensities of states such as Russia, China and Iran. In the past year, we have seen Cold War alliances and networks resurface and soft-power strategies employed to receive support in international fora. There is a strong sense that alternative, illiberal, global interconnections are being (re)forged.
We invite participants to debate and map various cases from the illiberal spectrum – from one-party states to theocracies and various forms of authoritarianism (competitive or one-person rule) to elaborate commonalities of illiberal engagement with globalisation via theatre. The workshop’s aim is to conceptually frame the role of theatre in illiberal regimes’ international relations as a global, post-Cold War phenomenon.
Recent scholarship on the Cold War emphasises the spatial and conceptual diversity of illiberal interconnections in the realm of cultural diplomacy under the term of ‘alternative globalisations’. However, patterns of the late-Cold War have carried over into the post-1989 period, as Western-guided globalisation has hardly been ‘the only game in town’ in recent decades. This phenomenon raises the question of how to approach theatre history and non-Western-centric interconnectedness after 1989. The workshop will address this central question by proposing the post-Cold War as a period in which new polarities have emerged. These novel alignments and their impact on theatre have yet to be comprehensively studied.
Globalisation has pushed many illiberal states to venture into market economics, sometimes radically changing the landscape of subsidised cultural production and its international distribution. The new synthesis of market and command economies has affected national theatre communities, engendering new partnerships between states and artists as well as new modes of resistance. While independent and private theatre initiatives may persist alongside state-led engagement with the international theatre community, governmental involvement remains crucial in illiberal regimes. It shapes the careers of local practitioners and influences choices about performance production, international tours and participation in festivals.
The workshop will focus on the following questions: