Paula is an assistant professor of international history at the Fundação Getulio Vargas. Her manuscript, Brokering Capital: Latin American Public Credit and the Making of Global Finance, 1852-1914, examines how Argentina‘s and Brazil’s trajectories as sovereign debtors shaped the regimes of sovereign creditworthiness that contributed to making finance global. She has conducted research in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. She is interested in the global history of capitalism, histories of quantification, information and the future.   Paula joined global dis:connect funded by the Munich Centre for Global History.  

Making Global Numbers: The Quantification of Economic Life in the Global South, 1890–1990

At the Munich Centre for Global History and at gd:c, Paula is working on her second book, Making Global Numbers: The Quantification of Economic Life in the Global South, 1890-1990, which examines the production of statistics and indicators designed to measure national economies as part of political, social and intellectual projects of economic governance, state-building and nation-making in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Angola in the long 20th century.  

Ross 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 joined global dis:connect funded by the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR).  

The Order of Empathy

Ross’ current book project 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.

Andreas is a fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington. He specialises in infrastructure networks and their spatiality and materiality in the 19th and 20th centuries. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich. Before joining the GHI in 2021, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the EUI in Florence. His first monograph Human Porterage and Colonial State Formation in German East Africa, 1880s–1914: Tensions of Transport (2022) explores the role of caravan transport and human porterage in colonial East Africa, unveiling the resilience of precolonial structures in the era of ‘high imperialism’.   Andreas joined global dis:connect funded by the German Historical Institute Washington.  

Intercontinental civil air routes between 1919 and 1947

At gd:c Andreas is working on a project that examines the codification of aerospace as well as the diplomatic and economic factors driving intercontinental airway extension. Interwar aviation can add local layers to the study of global networks because it was rooted on the ground. The microcosms of airfields along intercontinental routes recast the materiality of civil aviation and its meta-infrastructure, such as radio and weather stations. It accentuates the fragility of technology and reveals how local conditions and actors affected global structures.  

Martin has worked on such disparate topics as modernist closet dramas, revolutionary manifestos, Platonic dialogues, a history of world literature, environmental storytelling and Rotwelsch, the secret language of Central Europe. Having studied at the universities of Constance and Bologna, he pursued these topics at Columbia and Harvard, with shorter stints at Cornell, the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, the New York Public Library and the American Academy. He occasionally attempts to bring the humanities to the attention of a larger public with op-eds, book reviews, essays, anthologies and open online courses.   Martin joined global dis:connect funded by the humboldt/siemens foundation.  

Culture: the story of us, from cave art to K-pop