Mark is a professor of early modern history at the University of Bamberg. His research focusses on the economic, social, urban and cultural history of the early modern period and on the history of North America and the Atlantic world. Mark holds a PhD from the University of Augsburg. He was Feodor Lynen Fellow at Pennsylvania State University in 1999-2000 and a DFG Heisenberg Fellow from 2001-2004. He has been a member of the Academia Europaea since 2022 and is chairman of the Gesellschaft für Globalgeschichte e.V.  

 

Transatlantic Entanglements: Central Europe and North America in the Long Eighteenth Century (c. 1683–1820)

The project deals with the intensifying relations between Central Europe and North America in the 18th century. More than 100,000 Germans and Swiss emigrated to the New World by 1800, and 30,000 German soldiers were deployed in the American War of Independence. By means of transatlantic migration, religious minorities and dissidents from Central Europe were ‘exported’ to North America. Secular networks of merchants, ship-owners and business travellers as well as religious communication and support networks developed. In addition, an independent German-American culture emerged in Pennsylvania.

Frances is an associate professor of history at the University of Otago. She has published widely on colonial networks, oceanic mobilities and transnational labour cultures in the Pacific, with a particular focus on the age of steam. Her books include Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism and the co-authored Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific. She also edited New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives. Her research has been supported by the Australian Research Council and the National Library of Australia.  

Refrigeration, food and the transformation of the Pacific, c.1870-1960

During her fellowship Frances will be examining the history of refrigeration and its application to food trades in the colonial Pacific. Frozen meat and dairy exports to Britain underpinned the transformation of New Zealand (and a lesser extent Australia) as the ’empire’s farm’. This project reorients the focus from dominant south-to-north exchanges, to consider how manufactured cold shaped settler colonial engagements with the island Pacific, including in controlling climate and changing patterns of production and consumption.

Gerald is a professor of applied theatre studies at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen. He studied theatre, English and French literature at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he also obtained his PhD with a thesis on theatre as memory. His research focuses on forms of contemporary theatre, dance, performance, aesthetics, theories of memory and the intermediality of theatre in relation to the visual arts. Gerald has published more than 100 articles on contemporary dance and theatre performance. His most recent book bore the title Theater- und Tanzperformance zur Einführung.  

Body, Landscape and Memory: Transcultural Theatrical Commemoration as an Ethical Process

Gerald’s research project explores the connection of body, landscape and memory. It takes up recent developments in memory and trauma studies that view processes of commemoration as dynamic, transformative and transmedial phenomena. It shifts the body into the centre of investigation and attempts to locate it in a commemorative happening that, in the theatre, is also always an event, a connex of performers and audience. With reference to the (traumatised) body, memory is not a foundational moment of identity, but functions as a moment of disruption and as work on absence.

Ulrike is a professor of modern history at the University of Cologne. She has held visiting positions at Cambridge, the EUI Florence and Science Po Paris. Her research interests lie in comparative, colonial and global history. She has worked on the comparative history of European empires, particularly British and German colonies in Africa, issues of knowledge transfer between empires and postcolonial themes. More recently, she has dealt with questions of bonded labour and the histories of plantation.  

Colonial labour migration in Africa - a detour from global migration narratives and detouring as practices of resistance

  Ulrike is currently focusing on colonial labour migration in Africa. During her fellowship at global dis:connect, she will explore why the topic has received less attention than the dominant migration narratives of the 19th and 20th century. Secondly, she will investigate the concrete agency of African migrant workers who tried to be deviant and to use ‘detours’ to resist their integration into the capitalist market economy of the new colonial rulers in Africa at the end of the 19th century.

Andrea is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Kifyasi specialises in medical history and is interested in China’s medical aid to post-colonial African countries and medical diplomacy. He earned his PhD at the Department of History, University of Basel, in 2021. His latest journal article examined the effectiveness of exchanges of medical knowledge across the Global South using case studies of the Chinese-funded medical projects in Tanzania from 1968 to the 1990s.  

Neither “Saviour” nor “Exploiter”: A Historical Study of China’s Medical Assistance in Post-Colonial Tanzania

At global dis:onnect, Andrea is studying the history of China’s medical assistance in post-colonial Tanzania, particularly the implications of Chinese medical aid in the development of Tanzania’s health sector under the discourse of South-South cooperation. He’s exploring how China’s medical assistance reflected the Southern agenda of promoting self-reliance and lessening Northern dominance in medical aid and knowledge in the South. The ensuring book will touch on South-South cooperation as well as economic, political and knowledge entanglements in bilateral relationships among countries of the Global South.

Aglaya is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on European and Soviet modern art. She is the author Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2022), which received Modernist Studies Association’s 2023 First Book Prize. Her research has been supported by the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, the University of California President’s Fellowship in the Humanities, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the ACLS, among others.  

Off the Grid: Energy and Exhaustion in the Global East

As a fellow at global dis:connect, Aglaya will work on a monograph on how energy was represented in the socialist world, in particular the Soviet Union, as it intersected with the imaginary of the human body and anxieties about that body’s limited energies. During her residency, she will explore how the emergence of new materials and technologies (electrification, car manufacturing, stainless steel production, off-shore drilling) were understood, throwing into sharper relief the question of how the socialist body and the socialist environment should look and function.  

 

Arnika is an interdisciplinary scholar of Thailand working at the intersections of the country’s aesthetic and political modernities. She is the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema and Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong. She is currently a professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.  

Digital futures: Asian media temporalities and the expansion of the sphere of politics

Arnika's project investigates the temporal properties of the digital and draws the counterintuitive properties of digital mediation in relation to the dis:connectivity of a global gaze on Asian political spheres. It examines the temporal efficacy of features unique to the digital sphere and inquires into the counterintuitive ways in which contexts of political constraint shape and facilitate political expression. Digital futures thereby interrogates assumptions about the teleologies of progressive politics and investigates digital media across political fields and national boundaries in a highly globalised Asia.  

Christof is professor in modern history at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Before coming to Bern he held temporary professorships at Freiburg i. Br., Konstanz, Basel and the FU Berlin and was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2013-2015). His field of expertise include European history, global history and social and economic history. He is the author of, among others, Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World (2018) and co-editor of The Global Bourgeoisie (2019) and, recently, a special issue of the Historical Journal on Global Social History.  

Lost traces. Global dis:connections in the genealogy of European social history

At global dis:connect, Christof will work on a monograph on the relationship between German Anthropology and Folklore studies between the 1850s and the 1930s. In the late 19th century, many anthropologists expounded the similarities of “primitive” societies in colonial and European rural peripheries as a matter of fact. Such a joint perspective, however, became ever more challenged after the turn of the century when domestic traditions became the foundation of regional and national identities. This disconnection was sustained by distinct notions of temporality: colonial cultures remained to be considered “peoples without history” by contemporary scholars, whereas European folk culture was integrated into a regional historical framework. The project thus analyses what was described as “inventions of tradition” by European social historians on the one hand and the “othering” of non-European civilisations as studied by global historians and postcolonial scholars on the other within one field of analysis and theoretical framework.

 

Claudia studied Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and earned her PhD from the Technische Universität Berlin. She has worked as a lecturer of art history, and as an independent researcher and curator in Bogotá and has held fellowships, among others, at the documenta archiv in Kassel and, at the Leibniz Universität in Hannover. Her research interests and publications focus on garden history, modern art, and the intersection of migration, exile and art from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th century.  

Detours on the road/historiographic detours: Bogotá in the first half of the 20th century

At global dis:connect, Claudia is developing a project which focuses on case studies of some European, mostly German-speaking, artists and intellectuals who arrived in the first half of the 20^th century in Bogotá, a city that, unlike other South American destinations, was not a recipient of large migratory flows and was not very open or attractive to immigration. The project addresses their work and experiences, and analyses, with a decolonial approach, the relations between places conceived or considered as a ‘detour’ and hegemonic historiographical narratives.  

Shane is a senior lecturer in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on logistics, Marxism, and performance history. He has published widely on the political economy of art, including the book The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism (Stanford University Press 2024). Shane holds a PhD in performance studies from UC Berkeley and co-edited Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Bloomsbury 2019). He is also a member of the Performance and Political Economy research collective.  

Generative Refusals: The Blockade as Art Form in the Logistics Revolution

As a fellow at global dis:connect, Shane will write a monograph on how the art world has become entangled in the planetary mine of supply chain capitalism. In addition to detailing the ways that contemporary museums, galleries and theaters depend on rare metals and mineral resources, Shane’s research will survey the efforts of artists since the logistics revolution to blockade and sabotage extractive infrastructures.