Past Associated Fellows Archive - global dis:connect

Elizabeth DeLoughrey

Elizabeth is a professor at UCLA. She authored Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Literatures, and Allegories of the Anthropocene andco-edited Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture; Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment; and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches in addition to numerous journal issues on critical ocean, island and militarism studies. Her scholarship has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fulbright New Zealand, the Rachel Carson Center and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Submarine Futures: Cold War Aesthetics and its Afterlives

During her fellowship at the gd:c, Elizabeth will be working on a book project entitled Submarine Futures: Cold War Aesthetics and its Afterlives, which examines the deep seas as a vital frontier for Cold War militarism and a cultural and aesthetic space for contemporary art from the global South. More specifically, she will be writing about the International Seabed Authority and its configuration of deep-sea polymetallic nodules as figures of non-life, placing these discourses in conversation with indigenous ontologies of the ocean and its inhabitants.

Have a look at Liz’s research poster about her project.

Contact

Click HERE to mail Liz and HERE for a list of her publications.

26 September 2025

In Past Associated Fellows

Monica Juneja

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.

Contact

Click HERE to mail Monica and HERE for a list of her publications.

26 September 2025

In Past Associated Fellows

Paul Blickle

Paul Blickle is a PhD candidate at the LMU Munich. He received his BA (2017) and MA (2020) in history from the University of Heidelberg and spent a year abroad at the University of Durham and Yale University each. Since 2021, Paul has been working as a research assistant to Roland Wenzlhuemer. From September 2022 to September 2023, he is acting-managing editor of the review journal sehepunkte. Paul’s research interests include maritime history, port cities and steam power in the 19th century.

The global history of ballast in the 19th century

Paul’s dissertation investigates the global history of ship’s ballast in the 19th century (on ships, in ports, shipyards and markets). Ballast — commercially useless makeweight — served to stabilise ships on the high seas and thus enabled global connection at sea. At the same time, its absence or presence could have considerable dis:connective effects in that the universal need for ballast disrupted the transfer of goods from ship to shore, illegal ballast-dumping silted harbours and estuaries, and the (non)availability of ballast affected shipping routes and trade-patterns.

Contact

Click HERE to mail Paul and HERE for a list of his publications.

21 July 2025

In Past Associated Fellows, Past Fellows 2023

Kevin Ostoyich

Hailing from Valparaiso University, Kevin has published on German migration, German-American history, historical pedagogy, the Holocaust and the Shanghai Jews. He has been interviewing Holocaust survivors for many years and is frequently invited to speak about the history of the Shanghai Jews around the world.

After his global dis:connect fellowship (2022-2023), Kevin stayed with the centre funded by Spungen Foundation (2023-2025).

The Herero and the Shanghai Jews: Oral History in Genocide and Refugee Studies

Kevin’s forthcoming volume, The Herero and the Shanghai Jews: Oral History in Genocide and Refugee Studies, will tell individual stories analyse two little-known groups via oral history. The oral-history approach provides a level of intimacy often missing in standard textbook treatments. The book will explore major themes of commonality and divergence among two groups who have experienced genocide and exile at different points in the twentieth century. The goal is to elucidate how victims relate their experiences across generations, the meanings accorded to the refugee experience, perceptions of commemorative activities and how oral history can illuminate the experiences of genocide and forced migration.

Please click HERE to watch an Interview with Kevin.

Contact

Click HERE to mail Kevin.

17 March 2025