Ross Truscott joins global dis:connect
A warm welcome to our new guest Ross Truscott who joins global dis:connect in early June.
Ross Truscott is a researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Prior to joining the CHR in 2015, he held a postdoctoral fellowship in interdisciplinary feminist studies at Duke University. His work, drawing on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, is in the transdisciplinary field of psychosocial studies.
Ross’ current book project, The Order of Empathy, apprehends how empathy has been posited since the end of apartheid as a relation all South Africans should assume towards each other—what schools should inculcate in children, universities in students, and what the Constitution asks of every citizen. The book offers a genealogy of the injunction to put oneself into the position of others.
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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:
Kevin Ostoyich spoke in Edinburgh, Scotland following the Scottish Premiere of The Singer of Shanghai on 31 January 2023. Ostoyich co-wrote the play with Prof. Kari-Anne Innes and the students of the course, Historical Theatre: The Shanghai Jews at Valparaiso University.
The play narrates the true story of the Abraham family as they fled from Germany after Kristallnacht and found a haven in Shanghai, China. The play was performed in Edinburgh by students of Broughton High School. The event was sponsored by the Edinburgh Interfaith Association; the Edinburgh Jewish Cultural Centre; and Adam and Kyeon-ah Leven and Family.
Ostoyich is currently working on two more plays titled Three Girls of Shanghai and Three Boys of Shanghai. Ostoyich hopes the plays will be performed at schools around the world in order to spread awareness about the history of the Shanghai Jews. If you or anyone you know is interested in performing any of these plays, please contact Ostoyich at 
A warm welcome to our new guest Arnab Dey who joins global dis:connect in early February.
Currently an associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Arnab is a historian of modern India and the British Empire, with research interests centred around questions of law, labour and the environment. Arnab’s first monograph, Tea Environments and Plantation Culture looked at the monoculture tea enterprise of British east India. This study brought the plant and the plantation together in analysing the praxis and politics of commodity capitalism. His associated research agendas and publications have similarly involved tracing imperial capital, legal regimes and environmental transformations in the British colonial world and the Indian subcontinent. 
A warm welcome to our new guest Katharina Wilkens who joins global dis:connect in early February.
