Senior Fellows

Cecilia Nuria Gil Mariño has a doctoral degree in history and a graduate degree (magíster) in Theatre Studies as well as in Argentinian and Latin American Film from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). She is actively teaching and pursuing research in both Germany and Argentina. She was the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the PBI of the UzK, where she is currently a Guest Researcher, and was selected for the post of Research Assistant of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). During her doctoral and postdoctoral career, she has received various grants to carry out research in Argentina, Brazil, and Germany on Argentinian and Brazilian film in the early sound era, in addition to gender and violence in the works of Carlos Hugo Christensen and Walter Hugo Khouri. She is also a Guest Researcher at the UBA’s IAE, where she is involved in various projects on classic Argentinian film and audience behaviour. She is the author of El mercado del deseo. Tango, cine y cultura de masas en la Argentina de los ´30 (Teseo, 2015) and Negocios de cine. Circuitos del entretenimiento, diplomacia cultural y Nación en los inicios del sonoro en Argentina y Brasil (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2019), both of which garnered awards from the Argentinian FNA, the Argentinian Association for Audiovisual and Film Studies (AsAECA), and the National University of Quilmes. She has developed and continues to pursue cultural and art projects, such as festivals and artist residencies in Argentina, Brazil, and France.

Project: “No escurinho do cinema”. Sexuality, urban space, and cinema rooms in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo (1940-1950)

Abstract:

The project aims to analyse cinematographic experience as part of urban modernity, focusing on sexuality and gender relations in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo during the 1940s and 1950s. Film theatres played a decisive role in establishing normative sexuality as much as they were a space of transgression for women and non-normative sexualities (disidencias). As such, these theatres constituted contexts of conviviality between unequal and heterogenic groups in which a range of interactions took place, such as inclusion, negotiation, and tensions between classes, ethnic groups, generations, and genders. The project takes a comparative approach to the role of these spaces within different urban cartographies of sexuality while taking into account the muddling and destabilising effect state censure and social repression had on their borders. The analysis of maps of places where entertainment and sexuality converge concentrates on the pornographic film circuit and their capacity to act as the grounds for sexual transactions and homoerotic social interactions; as a dark space where women experienced sexual awakenings; and as a dangerous place marked by the threat of sexual harassment.

Main Discipline: History

Islam Dayeh is an Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at FU Berlin. He received his PhD from FU Berlin in Arabic studies, MA degrees from the University of Leiden (Islamic studies) and the University of Oxford (Jewish studies), as well as a BA from the University of Jordan in Amman. He is the director of the transregional research programme “Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship” (2010-), and the founding editor of the journal and monograph series Philological Encounters (2016-). In 2022, he was awarded a European Research Council Consolidator-Grant for his project “Polymathy and Interdisciplinarity in Premodern Islamic Epistemic Cultures”. He has held visiting professorships and fellowships at Columbia University, the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, the American University in Cairo, the Library of Congress, and the Luxembourg School for Religion & Society.

Project: The New Andalus. Negotiating Conviviality in Arabic Journalism in Latin America 1890s-1950s

Abstract:

It is estimated that almost 200 Arabic newspapers and literary magazines were published in Latin America from the 1890s through the 1950s. These publications not only reflect the struggles and aspirations of Arab migrants from Ottoman-ruled Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, but also provide a rich source for the exploration of how Arab diasporic communities engaged in new literary genres and editorial activities with the aim of imagining a new home beyond the national homeland. Yet despite their historical significance, these publications remain inaccessible and understudied. The project examines the ways in which these writers and publishers constructed a new cultural identity, one that combined the national identity of their homeland (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) and their struggle for liberation (from Ottoman and then colonial rule), with a romanticised Sephardic and Andalusian past integral to Latin American culture.

Main discipline: Arabic and Islamic Studies

Jörn Etzold is a Professor of the Institute of Theatre Studies of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Current areas of interest are theatre/performance in post-industrial environments, infrastructures and aesthetic theory (Ästhetik), as well as theatre and critical law theory (Rechtskritik).

Project: Theatres of the Proto-Juridical. The Russell Tribunals and the Peoples’ Tribunals on Genocide and Extraction in South America

Abstract:

The project examines extrajudicial tribunals from the perspective of theater studies, performance research, and political theory. It focusses on the Fourth Bertrand Russell Tribunal held in Rotterdam in 1980, so-called “on the Right of the Indians of the Americas”, that presided over cases of land-grabbing, expropriation, and genocide against indigenous peoples in Latin America during the military dictatorships of the time. These were often related to infrastructural projects, like hydrogenic dams or resource extraction. The project also examines the sessions of the Russell Tribunals’ main successor, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, an NGO founded in 1979, especially the ongoing Cerrado Tribunal which purports to “judge the crime of Ecocide against the Cerrado and the threat of cultural genocide of the peoples of the Cerrado”. Despite the tribunals’ lack of standing, the hearings often put pressure on local and national governments and assemble documentation that is then used in regular lawsuits. However, the tribunals also raise uncomfortable questions about the ‘epistemic violence’ (Gayatri C. Spivak) of Western law’s concept of rights as private property. Despite these concerns, they can also allow for the articulation and ritual performance of other concepts of justice, conviviality, and relations with the earth and with non-human beings.

Main discipline: Theatre studies

Mário de Augusto Medeiros da Silva is a Professor at the department of sociology of the University of Campinas (Unicamp) specialising in Brazilian social thought, literature, and society; Black intellectuals; and social memory. He is the author of Os escritores da guerrilha urbana: literatura de testemunho, ambivalência e transição política (1977-1984) (Annablume, 2008); and A descoberta do insólito: literatura negra e literatura marginal no Brasil (1960-2000) (Aeroplano, 2013). He is co-editor of Polifonias marginais (Aeroplano, 2015) and Rumos do sul: periferia e pensamento social (Alameda, 2018).

Project: Conviviality and Conflict: Antiracism, Social Memory, Cultural Heritage, and Contested Meanings in Contemporary Brazil

Abstract: 

My research project deals with social movements and the reclaiming of collective memory policies (políticas de memória) in Brazil, specifically in the context of antiracist transnational agendas. I argue that disputes over social memory policies are fundamental to Brazilian antiracist and anticolonial struggles, and that Black, indigenous peoples’ (povos originários), and urban periphery movements have articulated this extensively. I analyse recent aspects of three political acts stemming from antiracist social memory policies, along with the resulting debates between various agents of public power and social sectors: 1) the creation of the Memorial dos Pretos Novos do Cais do Valongo (Rio de Janeiro) in 2005; 2) the project Salvador Escravista (Bahia) created in 2020; and 3) the burning of the statue of Borba Gato by the Coletivo Revolução Periférica (São Paulo) in 2021. Narrative meanings about these three mega-metropolises are contested, as are the possibilities of the democratic existence of traumatic memories. In this sense, conviviality as a theoretical tool that articulates power inequalities and difference of social meanings lends itself to understand the relationship between social agents and political acts.

Main discipline: Sociology

Maud Meyzaud studied Philosophy in Strasbourg, France, and in Berlin, Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Literary Studies at the University of Konstanz and received the City of Konstanz Prize in 2010. She has been a Postdoctoral Fellow in Literary Studies at the University of Erfurt; an Assistant Professor (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the German Department of the FernUniversität in Hagen and at the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature of the Goethe University Frankfurt; as well as a Visiting Assistant Professor of the German Department of Northwestern University, Evanston, USA. She is currently a Research Associate at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin and a lecturer (Privatdozentin) at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where she received her venia legendi in Comparative Literature and German Literature in 2020; in addition to Acting Chair of Cultural Theory and Cultural Methodology in Konstanz, standing in for Kirsten Mahlke.

Project: Jewish-Latin American Cosmopolitanisms: Entangled Histories of Conviviality in the Wake of Forced Migration (1937-1956)

Abstract:

Among the refugees who were able to leave fascist Europe until the end of the 1930s, Jewish secular intellectuals arrived in Latin America to escape National Socialist racial policy. Their arrival in the Caribbean or in Latin American countries became a starting point for intense reflections on and experience of conviviality under the specific conditions of exile. My research project starts from the basic assumption that travelling without the right documents and experiencing how it feels to become an ‘undesirable foreign’ person deeply transformed the cosmopolitan subjectivity of such writers as Anna Seghers in the Caribbean and in Mexico City, and Anatol Rosenfeld in São Paulo. I propose that the early postcolonial approach of the historical and social realities of the Caribbean or of Brazil informs their respective writings in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, and that theses have to be traced back to this experience. Deprived of their home and of their fundamental rights, Seghers and Rosenfeld, like other Jewish intellectuals (i.e. Flusser, Zweig), were able to apprehend the (creole) Caribbean or the (transracial) Brazilian cultures of conviviality as true alternatives to their own “Enlightenment” cosmopolitan culture; while at the same time, confronting their own Jewishness and searching for new alliances based on entangled histories.

Main discipline: Literary Studies