A warm welcome to our new fellow Elisabeth Leake who joins global dis:connect in early July.
Elisabeth Leake is the Lee E. Dirks Chair in Diplomatic History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. She works on decolonisation, the global Cold War and histories of South Asia.
Her project at gd:c, Decolonization’s Discontents: Dissent and Opposition in the Aftermath of Independence, explores the development of different modes of opposition in the aftermath of political independence.
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In June Claiton Marcio da Silva commenced his term as a fellow at global dis:connect. Welcome.
Claiton Marcio da Silva is an associate professor of history at the Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul (UFFS), Brazil, with a PhD in the history of science.
At global dis:connect, Claiton Marcio Is exploring soybean production and exports as a fundamental dis:connectivity in globalisation, with a focus on political and socioenvironmental aspects. Continue Reading
In early July, Shane Boyle joins global dis:connect as a new fellow. Welcome to Munich, Shane!
Shane Boyle 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.
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. Continue Reading
In July Philipp W. Stockhammer commenced his term as a fellow at global dis:connect. Welcome.
Philipp W. Stockhammer is a professor of prehistoric archaeology focussing on the Eastern Mediterranean at the LMU Munich and co-director of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
In his research at gd:c he focuses on the dis:connectivities. He confronts as a (pre-)historian: the transformative power of dis:connectivity in the past and the challenge of narrating the past between othering and nostrification. Continue Reading
In March Jie-Hyun Lim commenced his term as a fellow at global dis:connect. Welcome.
Jie-Hyun Lim holds the CIPSH Chair of Global Easts and is a founding director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University.
At gd:c Jie-Hyun will work on multilingual versions of victimhood nationalism as a conceptual tool to illustrate competing memories of victimhood in the postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung across Europe and East Asia. Continue Reading
When were at global dis:connect, and what did you work on while here?
Image: Iveta Rysava/PolasBerlin
I was based at gd:c from July 2022 to June 2023, and my project was – and still is – concerned with scientific sound archives and how to deal with their legacy and ways of producing knowledge. Its focus and scope strongly resonate with my long-standing interest in temporality and the interplay of heritage, science and art, including in museums, exhibition spaces, urban sites and broader collaborative endeavours. The project is deeply rooted in my anthropological thinking, but it crosses disciplinary boundaries, drawing on critical heritage studies, sound studies, history of science and STS approaches. And it has a practical bent.
Where do you work now and are you still dealing with dis:connectivity?
After my fellowship, I returned to Berlin. One of the projects I was involved in last autumn concerned communicating science through sound and exhibiting (spoken) language. This was in the framework of the Nach der Natur (After Nature) exhibition. I was invited to comment on it and write about its media section, together with a colleague who is a musicologist and with whom I have been in dialogue for years. In this particular case, dis:connectivity was rather absent (an intriguing figure of speech). However, I have always worked on paradoxes and contradictions, as many anthropologists do, which seems inevitable when one needs to engage intensively with other people while doing ethnographic fieldwork in a ‘foreign’ context. In many respects, dis:connectivity fits into the paradoxical paradigm that I develop in my work. Analytically speaking, I find it more productive to use this tool in my research on scientific sound archives than in, for example, my book on Beirut.
What text – whether a book or article – have you read recently that particularly impressed you?
I can’t recall any text that has impressed me recently. Though I have been rereading Michail Bachtin’s The Dialogic Imagination and rethinking his ideas of chronotope and polyphony.
Which song could be the soundtrack for your time at gdc?
It is hard to pick just one piece, but it could be Thunder Continues in the Aftermath by Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet.
https://youtu.be/38o6rozmYbI
Given the choice of anyone dead or alive, or even a fictional character, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
I would love to have dinner with Ursula K. Le Guin, a writer who passed away in 2018. Her evocative thought experiments deftly transcend conventions and genres (even if she is commonly classified as a speculative fiction or science fiction writer), while engaging with social, political and environmental issues. We would most likely talk about ‘what if’, temporality and technology, and reflect on how ‘the word for world is forest’ (inspired by the title of one of her books). If gd:c could fulfill my request and arrange a dinner with her for me, that would be a nice treat. A séance might do the trick.Continue Reading
What were you working on during your time at global dis:connect?
I was at global dis:connect from October 2021 to September 2022, working on my monograph on advertising practices and the construction of markets in an early modern border region. As academic schedules demand multi-tasking, there were also some side projects to be pursued: I finished an article discussing the emergence of the ‘Global Middle Ages’ in historical scholarship – a publication linked to my broader interest in temporality and periodisation in global history. Together with a group of colleagues, I worked on an edited volume about Encountering the Global in Early Modern Germany (hopefully appearing with Berghahn in 2024).
Where do you work now and are you still dealing with dis:connectivity?
After my stay in Munich, I returned to Tübingen University, where I work as a tenure-track professor of late-medieval and early modern global history, aiming to finish the monograph in 2024. In discussions with colleagues as well as in thinking about my own work, the theme of dis:connectivity helps me to reflect on the changed and changing position of global history. In this sense, I always found it helpful to conceive of dis:connectivity both as an agenda for obscure and invisible research topics and as a call for a more reflective edge in historical scholarship and the humanities, thinking about the conditions and limitations of our engagement with the world at large.
What work have you encountered recently that particularly impressed you?
Stuart Hall’s Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (2017, Duke University Press). It’s a captivating intellectual autobiography about the making of the postcolonial.
Which song could be the soundtrack for your time at gdc?
Whom would you most want as a dinner guest – anyone alive, dead or fictional?
If this is about food for thought rather than an elaborate meal, I think Thomas ‘Mad Hatter’ Tryon (1634-1703) might be an interesting dinner guest. Feasting on a cup of fresh water and some gently steamed vegetables, we could talk about religious radicalism in early modern London, life in Barbados and the Caribbean plantation economy, before moving on to discuss Jacob Böhme, Hindu religion and the importance of a well-aired bedroom, alongside vegetarianism and animal rights. It would be hardly anything than a very sober meal but a thought-provoking one, to be sure.
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A warm welcome to our new fellow Yvonne Kleinmann who joins global dis:connect in early October.
Yvonne Kleinmann is a professor of Eastern European history and director of the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies at Halle University
Her project at gd:c, Communicating Constitutions: A Cultural and Entangled History of Poland’s Basic Orders, deals with Polish constitutional history from the 14th century to the present from the angle of cultural history and (transnational) entanglement.
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In early October, Matthias Leanza joins global dis:connect as a new fellow. Welcome to Munich, Matthias!
Matthias Leanza is a historical sociologist specialising in empires, colonialism and nation-state formation and is a senior lecturer at the University of Basel.
At global dis:connect Matthias will complete his current book project on the legacy of German colonialism. Drawing on a wide range of sources from European and African archives, the study shows how and why the German overseas empire helped consolidate the nascent German nation-state. Germany soon lost its colonies, but their effects on the country persisted, leaving a complex legacy. Continue Reading
In October Valeska Huber commenced her term as a fellow at global dis:connect. Welcome.
Valeska Huber is a professor at the University of Vienna. She has led an Emmy Noether Research Group and has been a fellow at the German Historical Institute London. She is particularly interested in the mutual interdependence of opening and closure.
During her fellowship at global dis:connect, she will work on a monograph about the 20th-century dream of universal literacy, tracing the Each One Teach One method propagated by US missionary Frank C. Laubach and applied around the globe from the Philippines to Cuba and Brazil. Continue Reading