Advisory Board

Since July 2025, Anja Grecko Lorenz has served as Executive Director of the German Centre for Research and Innovation São Paulo (DWIH São Paulo). In this role, she focuses on strengthening cooperation between Germany and Brazil in science, higher education and innovation, and on fostering dialogue on topics of mutual interest to both countries. Previously, she spent ten years at the Brazil Centre of the University of Münster, including six years as Executive Director in Münster and four years as Director of its Liaison Office in São Paulo. She has 20 years of experience in international cooperation in higher education, science, innovation and public policy in Europe and Latin America. Her professional background includes positions with international cooperation organisations and consulting firms in São Paulo, Brasília, Hamburg and Barcelona. She holds a degree in Economics and Latin American Studies from Freie Universität Berlin.

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Arjun Appadurai is the Paulette Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. Since 2019, he has also been Professor of Anthropology and Globalisation at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. He also serves as Honorary Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Tata Chair Professor at The Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai and as a Senior Research Partner at the Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Prof. Appadurai is also the founder and the current President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India).

Benjamin Junge is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at SUNY New Paltz. Employing interdisciplinary methods from anthropology, sociology, political science, and history, he contributes to discussions on class mobility, identity, and poverty reduction in Brazil and Latin America. His current project, “‘Family is Everything’: Generational Friction, Social Media, and Political Polarization at Election-Time in Recife, Brazil” explores family dynamics and class identities among Brazil’s once-rising poor, with a focus on social media’s role during political crises. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (USA) and the Fulbright Commission of Brazil. Dr. Junge is committed to interdisciplinary research and aims to contribute to global networks addressing social issues related to inequality and conviviality.

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is a Professor in Sociology with a focus on Culture and Migration at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main. Previously to this position, she was Professor in General Sociology at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. She has published widely on gender, migration, and care work, and engages post Marxist and decolonial perspectives, feminist and queer epistemologies. She has been an early and staunch advocate of decolonial theory in the German-speaking world. Among her many publications is the book Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, published by Routledge (2010). More recently she has published with Shirley Anne Tate the Palgrave Handbook in Critical Race and Gender and with Rhoda Reddock Decolonial Perspectives on Entangled Inequalities: Europe and the Caribbean as well as with Pınar Tuzcu Migrantischer Feminismus in der deutschen Frauenbewegung. Her work engages with entangled migrations with a focus on German migration to Brazil, affective labor, materialities, institutional racism, racial capitalism and the coloniality of migration.

Gioconda Herrera holds a Ph.D in Sociology from Columbia University and is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales FLACSO in Quito/Ecuador since 1999. Over the past twenty years, she has studied the changing dynamics of South American Migration in the South-North Corridors to the USA and Europe. Her main publications address issues on social inequalities, international migration, gender and ethnicity; International Migration and Development and the State.  She is currently involved in two research projects: one is on indigenous migration and forced return in the era of deportation; the second is on immigration policies and social protection in South America. She has been Deputy Academic Director of FLACSO Ecuador (2014-2016), Chair of the Sociology and Gender Studies Department at FLACSO, and President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in 2020/2021.

Jeffrey Lesser is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and the Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning at Emory University. His field of research comprises Modern Latin American History, focusing on ethnicity, immigration and race, especially in Brazil, with a special interest in the construction of national identity. He has worked several times as a distinguished Visiting Professor in Brazil – mainly at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) –, and in other North American institutions such as Connecticut College and Brown University as well as at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Matthias Makowski was born in 1960 in Herne. He studied Catholic theology, classical philology and German studies at the Ruhr University in Bochum and completed a doctorate at the same university in 1987. At the same time, he worked as a secondary school teacher. After a period as a DAAD Lektor in Shanghai and teaching positions at the Goethe-Instituts in Prague, Riga and Krakow, he took over as head of the language department at the Goethe-Institut headquarters in Munich in 2008. This was followed by the management of the Goethe-Institut in Athens from 2012 – 2019. Since August 2019, he has been the director of the institute in Sao Paulo, responsible for South America. He is married and has two almost grown-up sons.

Nilma Lino Gomes is Professor of Pedagogy at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. She was the Rector of the Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira (UNILAB) (2013-2014), the Minister of the Special Secretariat of Policies to Promote Racial Equality (2015) and also the Minister of Women, Racial Equality, Youth and Human Rights (2015-2016) in Brazil. Her main areas of research are: ethnic-racial relations and education, teachers training for ethnic-racial diversity, public policies on education, social and racial inequalities, social movements and education with an emphasis on the Brazilian black movement.

Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha is a Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. She was a Post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University (1999-2000), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2002), Visiting-Professor at New York University (2006-2007), and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam (2017), and Tinker Professor at the University of Chicago (2018). She is currently a Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) Researcher and the Rio de Janeiro Research Foundation (FAPERJ) Fellow. Her research interests include creativity, plantation, and plantationocene in effects in the Caribbean, with the main focus on the Maroon and traditional populations cosmopolitics in South America and the Caribbean.

Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky has been Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) of Munich since 2008. Her work focuses on gender studies, sociological theories, sociology of the body, cultural studies and socialisation and subject concepts. She was Assistant Professor at the Institute for Sociology and Social Psychology at Leibniz-Universität Hannover and guest lecturer, amongst others, at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck. From 2010 to 2012 she was Executive Director of the Institute for Sociology of the LMU Munich, from 2011 to 2013 elected member of the Council of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) and since April 2013 elected member of this same institution.