Fellows

Home Institution: German Historical Institute Warsaw

Institution: Herder Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung, Marburg

As a part of the international research initiative Infrastructures of Memory: Actants of Globalisation and their Impact on German and Polish Memory Culture, Izabela Paszko investigates in her project the “non-human” factors (infrastructures) that shape the creation and maintenance of exhibitions on the Second World War and the Holocaust in Germany. She examines how climate awareness, sustainability, and technological innovation affect exhibition-making, and how curators navigate external frameworks such as tourist infrastructure, building and memory law, and administrative-financial regulations. Special emphasis is placed on understanding the interplay between material and immaterial factors, and on identifying networks of dependencies that constitute the final exhibition form.

Empirical research includes on-site fieldwork and interviews with “actants of memory” in selected German museums, supported by an interdisciplinary methodological framework integrating museum studies, anthropology, sociology of organizations, and cultural history. The project seeks to reconstruct the dynamics of exhibition production, evaluate transnational narrative patterns, and trace unconscious infrastructural influences. Ultimately, it aims to contribute to broader debates on cultural memory, globalised exhibition practices, and the evolving role of technology and environmental considerations in contemporary museum work.

During her Leibniz Fellowship, Izabela Paszko will continue her work on the current project and extend its scope to examine layered histories of infrastructural sites in East Central Europe, particularly those built or transformed by Nazi Germany. She investigates how these roads, factories, and logistical systems were repurposed after 1945, revealing ambiguous spaces that elude clear victim-perpetrator attribution.

Dr. Izabela Paszko is a cultural anthropologist and social historian specializing in the social history of Poland under the Nazi occupation. She defended her doctoral thesis at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München in 2023. Between 2020 and 2023, she was a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin in the INFOCOM project (‘Man hört, man spricht’: Informal Communication and Information ‘From Below’ in Nazi Europe). Since January 2024, she has been a researcher (postdoc) at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, where she investigates the structural factors shaping history exhibitions related to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Her first book, Informal Communication and Occupation in the Polish Borderlands was published in November 2025 by Routledge.

Das FOKORAD-Gebäude in Niesky ist in mehrfacher Hinsicht ein schwieriges Erbe. Nicht allein aufgrund seiner Erbauungszeit im Jahr 1940 – schon als Holzbau ist es nur schwer zu erhalten. Was stellt aber seine erinnerungspolitische Bedeutung heraus? In Niesky wurden bereits seit dem 19. Jahrhundert vorgefertigte Holzbauten hergestellt. Schon im Frühjahr 1933 sicherte sich die hier ansässige Firma Christoph & Unmack einen großen Auftrag der neuen nationalsozialistischen Regierung: den Entwurf von Arbeitslagern für den NS-Arbeitsdienst, später Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) genannt.

Die Rationalisierung der Holzbaracken wurde in den folgenden Jahren intensiviert: 1940 erhielt das dafür zuständige Büro „FOKORAD" sogar trotz allgemeinen Baustopps einen neuen Sitz – das bis heute erhaltene, aber weithin in Vergessenheit geratene Gebäude. Mit dem Krieg vergrößerte sich das Aufgabenspektrum. Die Frage der schnellen Produktion von Baracken war entscheidend für die Kriegsführung und trug zur Vernichtungs- und Vertreibungspolitik des NS-Regimes bei. Dafür wurden Produktionskapazitäten auf dem gesamten Kontinent beansprucht, oft in räuberischer Manier. Das Projekt untersucht so die Wechselwirkungen der Kleinstadt Niesky mit den Produktionskapazitäten in Nord-, Ost- und Südosteuropa.

Das Leibniz-Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung in Erkner richtet den Blick in jüngerer Zeit verstärkt auf globale Zusammenhänge von Ressourcenflüssen, Extraktivismus und der Globalisierung der Architekturproduktion. Mit seiner Wissenschaftlichen Sammlung hält es wichtige Bestände zur Erforschung der Städtebaugeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Jannik Noeske ist Akademischer Mitarbeiter (Postdoc) an der Fachhochschule Potsdam. Dort forscht er aktuell zur Planungskultur zwischen Transfer und Zwang in Berlin und Paris (1937–1945). In seiner Forschung beschäftigt er sich mit der Städtebaugeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, mit Fragen historischer Materialflüsse der Architekturproduktion sowie mit der Erinnerungspolitik im Stadtraum.

Home Institution: Bielefeld University

Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung

Over the past decades, popular music has increasingly been recognized as an important form of cultural heritage, shaping collective memory, identity, and historical interpretation. While scholarship has explored these dynamics primarily in Anglo-American and Western European contexts, the post-Soviet space remains comparatively underexamined. This project addresses this gap by investigating the heritagization of Soviet rock music, focusing on the transnational legacy of Viktor Tsoi.

Tsoi, a key figure of late Soviet rock culture, has become the center of a widespread network of vernacular memorials across Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Ukraine. These fan-driven sites—walls, monuments, and informal shrines—function as lieux de mémoire that both preserve and actively reinterpret the Soviet cultural past. At the same time, they are deeply embedded in contemporary political conflicts. In recent years, and especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Tsoi’s legacy has become increasingly contested, raising broader questions about the place of Russian-language culture within national heritage frameworks.

The project explores how Soviet rock heritage is produced, negotiated, and contested across different national and urban contexts. It focuses on tensions between vernacular and institutional heritage, the role of post-Soviet nostalgia, and the competing processes of heritage authorization. By combining critical heritage studies, popular music studies, and urban studies, the research examines how memory practices intersect with political transformation, cultural identity, and transnational entanglements. Methodologically, the project draws on a mixed approach, including interviews with musicians, fans, and cultural actors; digital ethnography of social media and local media environments; and survey data among music audiences. Building on extensive prior fieldwork in Russian cities, the project expands comparatively to Belarus, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The main outcome will be a monograph that analyzes Soviet rock as a contested heritage field shaped by both grassroots practices and institutional appropriation.

Dr. Alexandra Kolesnik is a cultural historian specializing in popular culture, heritage studies, and public history in Europe and the post-Soviet space. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Bielefeld University and a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Philipp Schwarz Initiative (2026–2027).

Institution: Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsmedien – Georg-Eckert-Institut (GEI)  

This project examines the contemporary revival of the "Greater India" discourse in India and its growing role in educational, cultural, and political narratives. The idea of "Greater India" based on interpretations of Hindu and Buddhist influence in Southeast Asia, was widely discussed within a framework of Indian civilizational superiority in Indian scholarly writings during the early 20th century. By the 1950s, however, the concept became politically unsuitable for building India's diplomatic relationships and partnerships with newly independent Southeast Asian states and largely disappeared from the public discourse.

The research focuses on how the idea of "Greater India" has re-emerged over the last decade and how it is increasingly used in public discourse, textbook revisions, heritage politics, and social media. Through an analysis of textbooks and educational materials, it explores how historical narratives are selectively reshaped and how the historical basis for "Greater India" is constructed and transmitted through school education. Particular attention is given to the transformation of mythological narratives into historical "facts" and to the political uses of history in legitimizing contemporary ideological agendas.

A comparative perspective is developed by examining the reception of this "Greater India" or "Indianization" theme in Indonesian and Malaysian textbooks and public history. The study asks how the Hindu and Buddhist past and the idea of Indian influence in Southeast Asia are represented in different national contexts, and how these histories are framed through concepts such as cultural exchange, localization, or civilizational heritage. It seeks to analyze how postcolonial states negotiate shared historical pasts while constructing distinct national identities and cultural narratives.

By connecting the historical genealogy of the "Greater India" idea with its present revival in India and its contested usage in Southeast Asia, the project contributes to broader debates on nationalism, memory politics, textbook narratives, and the uses of the past. It demonstrates how historical imaginaries become resources for contemporary identity formation and political legitimation, while also revealing tensions between historiography and ideologically driven reconstructions of the past.

Dr. Jolita Zabarskaitė graduated in the field of Area Studies, focusing on the history and politics of South and Southeast Asia. After conducting several longer field-research periods in India and Indonesia, while studying in Germany and Indonesia, she received her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 2022. Her first book "Greater India" and the Indian Expansionist Imagination, c. 1885-1965: the Rise and Decline of the Idea of a Lost Hindu Empire (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022), is the first systematic study of the genealogy, discursive structures and implications of the idea of "Greater India".

Home Institution: Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum, Bremerhaven

Institution: Cambridge Polar Museum, SPRI

This project aims at examining how Antarctic heritage is presented and interpreted in a museum setting. The core of the project is to investigate how the museum's collections and curatorial practices communicate the complex histories of Antarctic exploration, science, and geopolitics to the public. Through a qualitative and object-oriented methodology, the project will focus on analyzing the exhibition's narrative architecture, including the specific display of artefacts and the language used to contextualize them. This includes discussions with the museum’s curatorial staff to understand institutional priorities and observations of how visitors engage with the displays. The research aims to understand how the museum mediates the competing historical, scientific, and environmental values of Antarctica, and how these narratives shape the public's cultural understanding of the continent as a heritage landscape.  

The fellowship directly supports research on Antarctic Heritage Management at the German Maritime Museum (DSM) and fosters a German-British comparative dialogue. The insights from the Cambridge Polar Museum, with its Heroic Age collections, will provide a comparative perspective for the DSM’s expanding focus on contemporary Antarctic science, shipping, and logistics—areas often underrepresented in traditional narratives. The institutional goal is for this fellowship to serve as the initial step in integrating this comparative view into the DSM’s 2028 thematic year on the Antarctic, creating a basis for long-term dialogue on heritage interpretation. By linking the historical legacies of exploration to current global challenges like climate change, the project aligns with the Leibniz Research Alliance Value of the Past, interrogating how museums construct history and use the past to frame our understanding of the present.

Mohammad Abu Al Hasan is a Bangladeshi archaeologist and heritage professional, currently serving as a Scientific Associate at the German Maritime Museum (DSM) – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History. He leads a research project on the recognition, interpretation, and protection of German Antarctic heritage. His current research explores the heritagification of polar sites, as well as evolving concepts of authenticity, integrity, and museum interpretation in the context of extreme and remote heritage. Trained as an Archaeologist and heritage professional in Bangladesh, Egypt and Germany,  he has held positions at several heritage institutions, including the International Centre for the Study of Bengal Art (Dhaka), Taka Museum (Dhaka), Egyptian Museum (Cairo), and Freilandmuseum Lehde (Germany). Since April 2025, he is pursuing a PhD at the University of Bremen titled Protecting the Cultural and Scientific Heritage of Antarctica: Managing the Diversity, Ensuring Credibility for the Future.

Home Institution: Forschungsinstitut für Technik- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Deutsches Museum München

Institute: Cambridge University Botanic Garden

Gefährliche persistente Pestizide wie DDT, HCH oder Chlordan galten in der Nachkriegszeit als regelrechte Wundermittel in der Landwirtschaft und Krankheitsbekämpfung, bis in den 1960er Jahren ihre massiven Umwelt- und Gesundheitsfolgen bekannt wurden. Nachdem sie in den 1970er Jahren in den meisten Industrieländern verboten wurden, verlagerten Chemie-Produzenten ihre Märkte in den Globalen Süden. Berichte darüber, was Gefahrenstoffe in verarmten Ländern ökologisch und gesellschaftlich anrichteten, brachten in den folgenden Jahrzehnten Umweltdebatten mit Fragen der Vernetzung und Abhängigkeit der "Dritten Welt" zusammen.

Ziel des Forschungsprojektes ist, diese Entwicklungen als westeuropäisch-globale Verflechtungsgeschichte zu untersuchen, die umwelt-, bewegungs- und wissenschaftshistorische Ansätze miteinander verknüpft. Obwohl das Forschungsprojekt in erster Linie geschichtswissenschaftlich ausgerichtet ist, verweist es auch auf Problemkonstellationen der Gegenwart. Neben der sich verschärfenden globalen Ungleichheit, die nicht zuletzt über Umwelt und Ressourcen verhandelt wird, gilt dies vor allem für Konzepte der Interdependenz und der Biodiversität. Bereits in den 1980er Jahren erklärte die Kritik am Einsatz von gefährlichen Pestiziden, dass Giftstoffe sich nie beschränken ließen und hob die Untrennbarkeit von Mensch und Natur hervor.

Das Fellowship in den Cambridge University Botanic Gardens war einerseits durch die Forschungsressourcen zum Thema Pflanzenschutz v.a. im ehemaligen britischen Kolonialreich geprägt, andererseits stand auch der Wandel botanischer Gärten selbst im Zentrum. Während der Dekolonisation und der Entwicklung der modernen Umweltbewegung positionierten sich botanische Gärten verstärkt über Konzepte der Biodiversität und Versuche ihrer Erhaltung. Hieran lassen sich Inwertsetzungen von Umwelt, Biodiversität und Ökosystemen im Kontext der Pestiziddebatte studieren.

Sarah Ehlers ist Historikerin und stellvertretende Leiterin am Forschungsinstitut für Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte des Deutschen Museums München. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Global-, Umwelt-, Technik-, Wissenschafts- und Medizingeschichte. Ihre Promotion erfolgte an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin mit einer Dissertation zu kolonialen Medizin-Kampagnen im subsaharischen Afrika. Ihr aktuelles Forschungsprojekt behandelt die Wissensgeschichte von Pestizid-Einsätzen im Globalen Süden seit den 1960er Jahren.

Home institution: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

Institution: Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge

The emergence of Natural History Museums in the 19th century, especially following the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, marked a pivotal moment in the intersection of architecture, materiality, and scientific communication. This research aims to investigate how the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge navigates the integration of architectural design and geological narratives, focusing particularly on its use of decorative schemes and building materials as tools for the communication of nature's historicity. Throughout the 19th century, European Natural History Museums often employed both visual and material strategies to communicate a historical understanding of nature, particularly geological time. The Sedgwick Museum, designed by architect Thomas Graham Jackson, provides a unique case study for exploring how architecture may have contributed to the contemporary perception and communication of Earth’s deep history. A central question of this research is whether Jackson intentionally collaborated with geological experts to design a museum that visually and materially expressed geological narratives, or whether such interpretive readings emerged retrospectively, influenced by later curatorial practices, such as the exhibition of the building stone collection.

The museum’s sculptural elements—such as ammonites, ichthyosaurs, and the iconic ichthyosaur weather vane—are particularly significant. These features not only served didactic functions but also reflected the ambition to depict deep time in a visually engaging manner. Similar to the Natural History Museum in Vienna, which consciously developed an iconographic program to visualize geological history, the Sedgwick Museum may have employed parallel symbolic strategies, though the extent of these parallels remains an open question. In addition to its decorative elements, the museum’s use of building materials—including Clipsham, Ancaster, and Caithness stone—raises further questions about the role of materiality in communicating geological concepts. Did the choice of these stones intend to evoke a stratigraphic reading of Earth’s history, or did such interpretations arise later, as influenced by the chronological display of geological collections?

By comparing the Sedgwick Museum with other institutions of the period, such as the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Museum Building at Trinity College Dublin, this research will explore how architecture and material culture functioned to translate invisible geological processes into tangible, visually legible forms. Ultimately, this project will investigate whether the use of building materials and iconographic programs was an intentional strategy for conveying geological knowledge or whether it emerged as a byproduct of curatorial developments.

Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel is a Research Assistant in art and museum history and curator at the Natural History Museum Vienna. She is responsible for the art and scientific history of the collection, the art history of the museum architecture and building history, publications, editorial work and curating the Hochstetter Collection Basel. She is also a lecturer for museums studies at the University of Vienna.

Home Institution: Deutsches Museum

Institution: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge

Home Institution: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge

Institution: Deutsches Museum, München

For curators, replicas and reconstructions are the museum objects that fight back: resisting easy categorisation, requiring multiple levels of interpretation, and questioning our assumptions about the importance of authenticity for our visitors. And as a curator of the history of science, Dr. Hannah Price is particularly interested in how we should care for and interpret replica and reconstructed scientific instruments. What is their practical and intellectual value? While historians of science are deploying practical reconstruction as a way to understand lost craft and knowledge, how should we handle these objects in the museum? 

The Whipple Museum cares for a collection of five working (or no-longer-working) replica instruments made by the Cambridge master instrument maker Don Unwin (1918-2015) in the 1980s, 90s and early 00s. Four are on public display, where they are among the Museum's most charismatic and popular objects. Taken together, they represent a supreme but now rare craftsmanship: the skills of a professional instrument-maker. Yet it would be fair to say that the Museum doesn't entirely know how to approach them. Like the Whipple itself, they straddle the worlds of cultural history, and science and technology: types of museum with very different modes of interpretation and audience expectation. As the Museum plans a major reorganisation of it's displays, and mindful that the Unwins are some of our most popular objects, it takes a lot of hard thinking about the best ways to approach them.

During her Leibniz Fellowship Hannah Price will be discussing these questions with the team at the Deutsches Museum, who are grappling with them on a much grander scale. Dr Alexander Gall and the Deutsches Museum's Research Team have developed a concept of "museofacts": exhibits made by the museum that fall beyond the traditional category of original/authentic "museum objects". The aim through this project is to learn from the Museum's curatorial practice and audience research, and gain experience in how a national museum approaches these issues, to bring this knowledge home to Cambridge and inform the Whipple's own curatorial practice and plans. 

Hannah Price is Curator at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science.

Home Institution: Newcastle University

Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam

In England the ‘Post-war listing’ programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender (sometimes of last resort) of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (While & Pendlebury, 2024). The use of new architectural technologies and planning ideologies to develop public buildings, including worker housing, during the mid-twentieth century is an important moment in the planning and architectural history of many countries, operating under a wide range of social and economic systems. The legacies of this period are very different between different countries, but in many cases some examples of such buildings are being considered and protected as heritage. This opens-up important issues of how this period of planning history is framed, understood and valued within contemporary society. For example, do we consider material legacies of this period as important purely in terms of design, or is the social intent of the period of equal importance in our appreciation of such environments today?

The aim of this project is to extend the work undertaken by the researcher in England to the German context, in the expectation that the different political context of both the creation of welfare state architecture and its subsequent political positioning will have both elements of transnational overlap but also significant difference. Of particular interest in the case of Germany is the different histories – and trajectories – between the east and west of the country. A significant part of this process, alongside undertaking preliminary empirical research, will be to develop collaborative relationships with German researchers to enable a sustained programme of investigation, extending beyond the period of the Fellowship.

John Pendlebury is Professor of Urban Conservation, Centre for Heritage, Newcastle University, UK. He researches on issues of heritage, conservation, development, planning and governance, focusing on the interface between contemporary cultural heritage policy and other policy processes, as well as undertaking more historical work on how conceptions of heritage have been balanced with modernising forces. Principal publications include Conservation in the Age of Consensus (2009) and the edited collections Valuing Historic Environments (2009 with Lisanne Gibson) and Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape (2015 with Erdem Erten and Peter Larkham). His most recent book, with Jules Brown, is Conserving the Historic Environment (2021).

Home Institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Institution: Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF)

Meredith Whye is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Curriculum & Global Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of violent conflict, memory, and education reform, particularly in Kenya. She investigates how historical narratives of political violence shape contemporary educational policies and how these policies, in turn, influence collective memory and national identity formation. Drawing on interviews with educators and textual analysis, her work examines how education policies and curriculums work to shape citizens after political violence in a country. As a Fellow of the Leibniz Research Alliance Value of the Past, she was at Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) in February 2025. Her project at PRIF explored the contradictions in Kenya's self-representation on the global stage—as a regional and international peace broker—while simultaneously neglecting its own histories of violence. Through an analysis of policy documents, government rhetoric, and educational curricula, she examined how Kenya navigates its peacekeeping role while sanitizing discussions of domestic conflict.

Kenya presents an especially compelling case for studying the role of education in conflict and memory due to its history of low-intensity political violence. Kenya has experienced recurring election-related violence, ethnic tensions, and state repression. These issues shape how education constructs the citizenry of Kenya. The country's most recent educational reform, the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC), was introduced in 2019 with the stated goal of fostering critical thinking, civic responsibility, and national cohesion. Whye's research contributes by interrogating the role of the CBC in reinforcing particular historical silences. The CBC's emphasis on national unity, national values, and Westernized discourses ostensibly aim to promote peace, yet its curricular omissions suggest a reluctance to confront Kenya's history of ethnic and political violence. Instead of fostering engagement with the past, the curriculum often frames peace as a future-oriented project, detached from historical injustices.

By foregrounding the tensions between Kenya's international peacebuilding image and its internal conflicts, Whye argues that acknowledging and integrating historical violence into educational discourse is crucial for fostering meaningful reconciliation. Her research underscores the need to reassess how knowledge about conflict is transmitted in education, both within Kenya and in broader global discussions on peace and memory.

Home Institution: Universität Siegen

Institution: Leibniz-Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung (IRS)

Seit geraumer Zeit stehen sowohl der mit der Industrialisierung einsetzende Prozess der „Eroberung der Natur“ (Blackbourn) samt Begleiterscheinungen als auch der um 1900 entstandene Naturschutz als Reaktion auf diese technische Einhegung von Natur im Zentrum umwelthistorischer Forschung. Im Verlauf des 20. Jahrhunderts entstand indes zwischen diesen beiden Polen – dem Erobern und Bewahren von Natur – ein drittes Programm. Natur hatte darin wie im sogenannten konservierenden Naturschutz als Natur einen Wert. Natur war jedoch nicht mehr ausschließlich das von Menschhand unberührt Gewachsene, sondern nun auch das durch technische Eingriffe Herstellbare.

Ziel des Forschungsprojektes ist es, eine Geschichte der „Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit“ (Böhme) insbesondere aus einer deutsch-deutschen Perspektive zu schreiben. Jenseits des jeweiligen ideologischen Überbaus wird die Gestaltung der natürlichen Umwelt als gemeinsamer Problemhorizont industrialisierter Gesellschaften und als Programm moderner Staatlichkeit sichtbar. In den Blick geraten vor allem die Praktiken der Rekultivierung und späterer Renaturierung in den devastierten Flächen des Tagebaus. Sowohl der Braunkohlenbergbau als größter zusammenhängender Eingriff als auch der kleinflächigere, jedoch weit verbreitete Abbau von Kies und Sand warfen die Frage auf, was Natur in der industrialisierten Gesellschaft sein soll – und wie sie sich gestalten ließ.

Das Projekt untersucht, wie sich innerhalb weniger Jahrzehnte die Antworten auf diese Fragen wandelten und wie sich unterschiedliche gesellschaftliche Ansprüche an die natürliche Umwelt in ihre Gestaltung einschrieben. Welche Funktionen – etwa solche der Erholung und damit Reproduktion der Arbeitskraft – erfüllte also Natur im zeitgenössischen Diskurs und wie wurden sie tatsächlich umgesetzt?

Philipp Kröger ist seit September 2021 Mitarbeiter an der Professur für Geschichte der Gegenwart an der Universität Siegen und verfolgt dort ein Habilitationsprojekt einer deutsch-deutschen Geschichte der Umweltgestaltung. Zuvor erfolgte die Promotion zum Dr. phil an der Universität Augsburg mit einer Arbeit zur deutschen Nationalitätenstatistik. Zu seinen Veröffentlichungen zählen unter anderem: Das vermessene Volk. Nationalitätenstatistik und Bevölkerungspolitik in Deutschlands östlichen Grenzländern 1860–1945 (= Historische Wissensforschung, Bd. 21), Göttingen 2023; Über die Herstellung der Natur. Konturen einer deutsch-deutschen Geschichte der Umweltgestaltung, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 73 (2025) [erscheint in Heft 2/25].

Home Institution: Political Science Research Center, University of Évora

Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Dr. João Fusco Ribeiro is a research fellow at the Political Science Research Center (CICP) at the University of Évora, Portugal. He holds an MA in African Historical Studies (2016) and a PhD in Contemporary History (2023) from the University of Évora. His doctoral research focused on the armed guerrilla struggle waged by the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) against Portuguese colonial rule, earning an honorable mention from the Mário Soares Foundation Prize (2025). His research focuses on African liberation movements, the decolonization of Lusophone Africa, and the transnational networks of anti-colonial support from Eastern Europe.

As part of his project Fragmented Memories: The Struggle for the Past in Postcolonial Angola at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Dr. Ribeiro investigates how Angolan nationalist organizations have constructed competing and exclusive narratives of the anti-colonial struggle to bolster political legitimacy. In a country where political dynamics were profoundly shaped by a prolonged civil war (1975–2002), historical memory has been systematically weaponized — both to consolidate power and to counter official narratives.

The nationalist movements’ hegemonic tendencies have turned Angola’s anti-colonial historiography into a contested field, where facts are selectively emphasized, historical timelines are compressed, and distinct events are merged to serve political ends. These distortions manifest in the legitimizing narratives that each movement crafts for itself.

While the politicization of historical memory is not unique to Angola, its impact remains particularly profound. The disconnect between scholarly historiography and state-sanctioned memory continues to shape contemporary political discourse. As sociologist Christine Messiant provocatively observed: "Here in Angola, even the past is unpredictable." Dr. Ribeiro’s research underscores that in conflict-ridden contexts, historical memory demands as much scrutiny as the bullets and weapons that shaped them.

Home Institution: Pädagogische Hochschule der Universität Maroua (Kamerun)

Institution: IEG - Leibniz Institut für Europäische Geschichte Mainz

Romuald Valentin Nkouda Sopgui absolvierte sein Studium der Germanistik, Kulturwissenschaften und interkulturellen Kommunikation an der Universität Dschang (Kamerun). 2017 schloss er die Promotion in Allgemeiner und Vergleichender Literaturwissenschaft mit dem Schwerpunkt afrikanische Literatur an der Université d’Aix-Marseille (Aix-en-Provence) ab. Er ist Dozent (Senior Lecturer) für deutsche Literaturwissenschaft- und Landeskunde im Fachbereich Fremdsprachen an der Pädagogischen Hochschule der Universität Maroua (Kamerun). Von Februar 2023 bis Juli 2024 war er Fellow der Gerda Henkel Stiftung am Historischen Institut und am Global South Studies Center (GSSC) der Universität zu Köln.

Zu seinen jüngeren Veröffentlichungen zählen u.a.: « Kaiserliche Feierlichkeiten in Deutsch-Kamerun um 1900: Fotografien der Kaisergeburtstagsfeier zwischen kolonialer Lebenskultur und Konstruktion des Weißseins», in: Brünner Beiträge zur Germanistik und Nordistik, Band 38, Nr.1, 2024, S. 29-45; « On the body as a site of inscription of colonial domination: a visualisation of colonial hierarchy in labour and porter scenes in German Cameroon», in: Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2024, S. 187-211; « Kolonialfotografie und kritisches Blickregime: Franz und Marie Thorbeckes Fotosammlungen zu Kamerun (1911-1913)», in: WerkstattGeschichte, Heft 91, Band 1, 2025, transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, S. 97-110.

Ziel seines aktuellen Forschungsprojektes ist es, Fotografien, die im Kontext der deutschen Kolonialherrschaft entstanden sind, aus kamerunischer Perspektive umzudeuten. Dabei beschäftigt sich Herr Nkouda vor dem Hintergrund der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Erbe der kolonialen Vergangenheit mit der Frage der kollektiven Identitätsstiftung im heutigen Kamerun. Fotografien aus dem kolonialen Kamerun werden in diesem Projekt im Hinblick auf ihr Potential als Quellen für die nationale Geschichtsschreibung bzw. -vermittlung untersucht.

Kamerun wurde offiziell am 12 Juli 1884 zum deutschen „Schutzgebiet“ erklärt, nachdem kurz zuvor einige Verträge mit den Herrschern am Kamerunfluss unterzeichnet worden waren. Die rund dreißigjährige koloniale Fremdherrschaft des Deutschen Kaiserreichs endete mit dem Versailler Vertrag. Zu den wichtigsten Hinterlassenschaften des deutschen Kolonialismus in Kamerun gehören die Fotografien, die für das Kolonialreich produziert wurden. Als die Einlieferer von Fotografien ihr Können und Wissen in den Dienst des Kaiserreichs stellten, ahnten sie nicht, dass sie damit eine riesige Dokumentationsarbeit für die Gegenwart der kolonisierten Gesellschaft leisteten, die angesichts zunehmender Globalisierung von enormer identitätsstiftender Bedeutung sein sollte. Die Verwendung von kolonialen Bildern zu Zwecken der kolonialen Propaganda hat dennoch die allgemeine und vor allem die westliche Wahrnehmung so stark geprägt, dass jedes koloniale Bild als eine bloße historische Quelle erscheint, die heute nicht mehr viel wert ist. Anknüpfend an neuere Arbeiten zur Kolonialfotografie von Christraud M. Geary, Paul Jenkins, Jens Jäger, Stefanie Michels, Kokou Azamede und Elizabeth Edwards betrachtet Herr Nkouda die Kolonialfotografie als deutsch-kamerunisches Erbe, das aber aus kamerunischer Sicht neu interpretiert werden muss.

Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung

Mina Khanlarzadeh is a historian with a focus on the modern Middle East. Her research and writing are interdisciplinary, engaging global political thought, literary and translation studies, and gender studies. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. From 2021 to 2023, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the history of science at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy. From 2023 to 2025, she held research fellow positions in Berlin, Germany, at the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective" at Freie Universität Berlin. Her academic writing has appeared in journals such as Religions, Popular Music and Society, and the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Her creative nonfiction has been published in venues including the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is also completing her first book project, which examines comparative critiques of cultural alienation and their relationship to translation, as articulated in literary and political texts under (semi-)colonial conditions.

Her project examines the 1967 protest against the Shah of Iran's state visit to West Berlin as a pivotal moment of transnational solidarity between Iranian and German student activists. While Iranian students mobilized against their state's authoritarianism, German students protested West Germany's imperialism and complicity in Cold War politics. Their solidarity produced a layered temporality in which disparate historical experiences and political aspirations converged. Drawing on oral histories and multilingual archival materials, the project investigates two central questions: first, how solidarity in 1967 was negotiated across differing temporal horizons; and second, how that moment has been remembered by participants shaped by divergent political trajectories and uneven experiences of belonging, displacement, and exile. The project further explores how Berlin's unique history shaped a spatiotemporal site of convergence, where distinct national struggles and student movements came into relation through their co-presence in a shared time and space. By tracing how the protest has been remembered and reframed over time, the project explores the shifting afterlives of political ideals—from revolutionary hope to disillusionment, nostalgia, and critical reassessments of the past—while illuminating the politics of memory in relation to the present and to shifting collective narratives.

Home Institution: Lehrstuhl für Neueste Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte am Historischen Institut der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

Institution: Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow – in Leipzig 

Der Historiker Axel Doßmann verstärkt im Rahmen des Leibniz-Fellowships „Value of the Past“ seine Zusammenarbeit mit dem Leipziger Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow. Zur Vorbereitung eines Forschungsprojektes konzentriert er sich auf Interviews mit jüdischen und nicht-jüdischen Displaced Persons (DPs) und untersucht ihr Verhältnis zur zeitgleichen khurbn-Forschung. Der amerikanische Sozialpsychologe David P. Boder war 1946 mit einem Tondraht-Rekorder nach Europa gereist, führte insgesamt 131 Interviews in vier Ländern und 9 Sprachen. Er sprach mit Jugendliche und Alten, mit Frauen und Männern, Kommunist:innen, Zionist:innen und Religiösen. Die meisten kamen aus Mittel- und Osteuropa, andere aus Frankreich oder Griechenland. Diese „uprooted people“ beklagten ihr Leid, forderten Rache, reflektierten über das Menschenmögliche, erhofften Hilfe und formulierten Botschaften, die uns heute unvertraut sind – wertvolle, frühe Deutungsangebote von Verfolgten des Nationalsozialismus als auch des Stalinismus.

Boders Audiographie würdigt das frühe Sprechen und Erzählen über individuelle Erfahrungen in und mit der „man made catastrophe“ des deutschen Vernichtungskrieges. Als Sprachforscher wollte Boder Spuren eines Prozesses zu untersuchen, den er „deculturation“ nannte: das „schrittweise Zurechtstutzen eines menschlichen Wesens“ durch Gewalt und Terror, das zur Preisgabe bisheriger Werte und Moralvorstellungen führt. Nach dem Tod des jüdisch-amerikanischen Forschers im Jahr 1961 ignorierte die zeithistorische Forschung die Audio-Interviews, bis in die 1990er Jahre geriet die Pionierleistung in Vergessenheit.

Doßmanns Schwerpunkte liegen a) auf Sekundär-Analysen und Kontextualisierung ausgewählter Interviews, b) auf Fallstudien zum Wertwandel und der Materialität dieser akustischen, inzwischen digitalisierten Überlieferung sowie c) auf multimedialer Rekonstruktion der Lebensläufe der Interviewten auch für die Zeit vor 1933/39 und nach 1946 auf der Grundlage anderer Überlieferungen: Fotoalben, Berichte, Briefe, spätere Videointerview, aber auch Dokumente der Täter und Täterinnen. Mit einem solchen integrierenden Zugriff soll Interviewforschung komplexe und nicht zuletzt alle Sinne ansprechende Anschauung bieten, wie verschieden Jüdinnen und Juden und ihre Familien vor und nach der Shoah gelebt und auf antisemitische Zumutungen und extreme Gewalt reagiert haben.

Mit seinem Blog „Fragen an Displaced Persons: 1946 und heute. Die Interviews von David P. Boder“hat Axel Doßmann bereits ein Forum etabliert, auf dem Boders akustische Artefakte öffentlich befragt und reflektiert werden können. Zuletzt veröffentlichte er gemeinsam mit Susanne Regener das Buch „Fabrikation eines Verbrechers“, eine Visual History und Quellenedition zur Geschichte von Rassismus, Polizei und Fake News (Spector Books Leipzig 2018, erneut bpb Bonn 2020) sowie einen APuZ-Beitrag zum „Holocaust in höchster Auflösung“.

Home Institution: Newcastle University

Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZfL)

This project by James Harriman-Smith sets out to test the hypothesis that a significant shift in the concept of performance occurred during the eighteenth century, from an emphasis on performance as object to an emphasis on performance as action.

As Mary Crane (2001) has shown, performance in the 1500s primarily meant to 'carry through to completion' or even 'to construct': a sixteenth-century document thus records money paid to a carpenter for 'performing a door'. Smith's work shows the persistence of this meaning (with its emphasis on objecthood) into the 1700s, where it exists alongside action-based approaches. Letters by the actor David Garrick (1717-1779) thus both evaluate the 'performance' of aspiring dramatists (i.e. the object that is the script they have submitted) and invite correspondents to comment on 'me and my performance [...] my action'. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) defines 'performance' as both 'action' and 'composition'.

The project claims that the shift of emphasis here lays the foundation of modern approaches to performance, including the twentieth-century discipline of performance studies and its analysis of everything from political activism through to ritual and business management.

James Harriman-Smith is a senior lecturer in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature at Newcastle University (UK); he specializes in the material, practical and intellectual history of the theatre.

Home Institution: Peace Research Institute Frankfurt or PRIF – Leibniz-Institut für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung

Institution: Newcastle University, School of Geography, Politics & Sociology

This research project focuses on investigating how Russia has been mobilizing memory in relationship with Finland in the context of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and Finland’s accession to NATO. The idea of a short-term research stay at Newcastle University came as one of the results of Olena Podvorna’s ongoing DFG-funded project about the changes in security perception and understanding of five European Arctic countries after 2022. While leading the project she found it important to study the Finnish decision of joining NATO from a different angle that provides a more complex understanding of the reasons for the decision taken. The project also investigates how Moscow has been addressing Helsinki since then.

Respectively, the proposed project addresses the following research question: how have Russian decision-makers mobilized narratives of the imperial and colonial past to reimagine Finland and to rethink Russia’s security and foreign policy towards Finland as a new NATO member?  This question is exceptionally important due to the salience of historical narratives related to imperial and colonial past in Russia’s justifications of its aggression against Ukraine that began in 2014 and escalated in 2022. A rapidly growing literature on the securitization of memory has demonstrated the colonial nature of Russia’s war on Ukraine and explored an important role of memory conflicts in Russia’s increasingly aggressive policies towards some other former Soviet Union republics, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. However, Moscow has extended such an approach to other countries, in particular Finland. The case of the latter is of a special importance as Finland possesses a very turbulent history of mutual relations with Russia, and currently finds itself in a very vulnerable position due to its geographical location, but also due to Moscow’s aggressive policy-making in the region. Even more, Moscow has been trying to apply similar patterns towards Helsinki as it did towards Kyiv.

Olena Podvorna is a senior researcher at PRIF and a displaced scholar from Ukraine; she leads the DFG-funded project “A New Role for NATO in the High North? The European Arctic and Russia’s War Against Ukraine”; she researches on issues of European and transatlantic security, the Arctic geopolitics, NATO’s strategic shift in the Arctic and Northern Europe, Russia’s security and foreign policy, and Ukraine’s security and foreign policy.

Home Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Institution: Newcastle University

In her main fellowship project on Clashes of Memory and Development in Kyrgyzstan Memory and Heritage, Aksana Ismailbekova focused on the competing claims on Sulaiman-Too, the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Kyrgyzstan, and how memory and development clash in this context. Sulaiman-Too in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, intertwines sacred space, religion, memory, and kinship. Cemeteries honor ancestors, transmit knowledge, and sustain community, yet state-led urban development threatens graves, exposing tensions between heritage, religious devotion, and modernization.

She also worked on the project Migration and Welfare Austerity: Mobilizing Kinship for Care, Welfare and Development in Kyrgyzstan which is a comparative study on elderly care, translocal mobilities, and future building in the Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asian contexts. The project investigates the process through which elderly care is provided in different types of kin relationships in the region, together with a historical perspective on how it has changed in the period from Soviet to post-Soviet (1991 and onwards), which marked the transition from Soviet Rule to independent nation-states. For instance, during the Soviet period, the authorities attempted to limit certain types of kin ties, which have since been revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union also provided many kinds of state-led institutional care which have now, because of increased mobility in the region, taken new forms and practices. Migrant remittance is one such.

Aksana Ismailbekova is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin, Germany, where she has been conducting research since 2020.  Ismailbekova completed her dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. Based on her PhD dissertation, she wrote her monograph Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan, which was published by Indiana University Press in 2017. Her research work focuses on nationalism, kinship, ethnicity, patronage, conflict and gender in Kyrgyzstan.

Home Institution: Deutsches Museum, München

Institution: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge

Artemis Yagou, PhD, is a historian of design and technology. Her publications include Fragile Innovation: Episodes in Greek Design History (2011), Technology, Novelty, and Luxury (edited volume, 2022), Products, Users, and Popular Luxury in Early Modern Greece (2024), and Construction Toys: Education, Politics, and Technology (forthcoming, 2025). Her personal website is www.yagou.gr

In her project, she focuses on acquiring a deeper understanding of the circulation practices of scientific instruments, by examining the mentalities of individual actors involved and the related appropriation processes. In particular, she researches the usage of scientific instruments in the Greek lands – then part of the Ottoman Empire – during the last decades of the eighteenth century and in the beginning of the nineteenth. The instruments originated primarily from England, France, the Habsburg Empire, and Russia. Various stakeholders, including Greek scholars and merchants as well as foreign travellers, acquired and introduced these instruments to this geographical space for a variety of reasons, such as education, practical uses in the maritime trade or in travel, and entertainment. The circulation and use of scientific instruments was a novel practice embedded in a period of financial prosperity and intellectual growth that was later termed Greek (or Neohellenic, or Balkan) Enlightenment. This phenomenon was directly influenced by the wider philosophical and intellectual movement in eighteenth-century Western Europe and is considered a local manifestation of the overall European Enlightenment. The Greek Enlightenment encompassed the belief in rationalism, self-improvement, and the pursuit of happiness; the usage of scientific instruments contributed to these themes.

Home Institution: Museum of Nature Hamburg, Leibniz-Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB)

Institute: Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge

The demand for critical minerals has led to a global boom in the exploration for ore-bearing rocks. Such rocks can be valuable samples for geological research today and in future; however, mine sites are typically exploited to the point of exhaustion, leading to a loss of geodiversity in the field. To preserve rock samples from active mining sites for future research at the LIB collections, Dr. Stefan Peters aims at expanding their existing ore collection with samples from contemporary mining sites. However, the representative collection and documentation of such samples for future research is far from trivial.

During his fellowship, he is studying the rich ore collections hosted at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, mostly collected in the 19th century, to investigate historic collection strategies and their strengths and weaknesses for scientific research today. The ultimate goal of these investigations is to develop methods for the representative collection and documentation of ore samples that will support scientific research both now and in the future.

Dr. Stefan Peters leads a research group, curates a collection of over 90,000 rocks and minerals, and manages a 500 m² exhibition area at the Museum of Nature Hamburg – Mineralogy. His primary academic interests include the processes that made Earth habitable around 4.5 billion years ago and the petrogenesis of mineral ores essential for a sustainable future. He is also a guest lecturer in geochemistry at the University of Hamburg.

Home institution: Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB), Hamburg 

Institution: University of Cambridge, University Museum, Department of Zoology

Grigory Evtukh's research focuses on quantifying the rates of morphological evolution in three major nectarivorous bird clades: hummingbirds (Trochilidae), honeyeaters (Meliphagidae), and sunbirds (Nectariniidae). Despite their independent evolutionary origins and distinct geographic distributions, these groups exhibit similar adaptations for nectar feeding, such as specialized beak morphology. The goal is to determine which clades show faster rates of morphological change and identify the ecological, historical, and geographical factors driving these differences. He uses a combination of geometric morphometrics, phylogenetic comparative methods, and advanced imaging techniques like microCT scanning to analyze external and internal morphological traits.

The fellow holds a Master's degree in biology from the Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) and is currently pursuing his PhD at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB) in Germany. Most of his scientific projects were connected to the ornithological museum collections. This is a unique source of data on biodiversity, evolution, morphology, biogeography and many more topics. Museum specimens provide not only a snapshot of present-day diversity but also a historical record that can trace changes over hundreds of years, making them invaluable for evolutionary studies.

During his fellowship at the Cambridge Museum of Zoology, Grigory Evtukh focused on their collections of sunbirds, hummingbirds and one additional group of nectarivorous birds - Hawaiian honeycreepers. Hawaiian honeycreepers are a unique group that evolved a wide range of specialized traits in geographic isolation. Now they are critically threatened, with 18 species already extinct. Incorporating that data will expand his comparative analysis, filling gaps in the existing dataset and enabling a more complete assessment of evolutionary rates across nectarivorous birds. This project will deliver insights into the factors driving morphological evolution, contributing to evolutionary biology and biodiversity research. Hopefully the future results can support conservation strategies for endangered avian groups.

Home Institution: University Museum of Zoology, University of Cambridge

Institution: Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Frankfurt

Dr Mitchell is the Curator of non-insect Invertebrates in the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge.  Her research investigates the role of ecological processes on evolution through deep-time, from the first animal communities of the Ediacaran, to the present www.deeptimeecology.org.uk

This project will focus on the origins and early evolution of animal mobility, which occurred over the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition ('ECT' ~570-510 million years ago). The ECT marks the most important step-change in the biosphere, witnessing successive pulses of biotic innovation culminating in the 'Cambrian explosion' of animals. Understanding the tempo and character of evolution over this period is key to understanding the origins of today's biosphere. Although this interval has been heavily studied in terms of the origin of new animal phyla, comparatively little attention has been paid to the evolution of behavioral complexity. Not only can behavioral complexity sometimes reflect neurology – which has a poor preservation potential – but it can also capture ecology (e.g., movement vs. predation), and how animals interact both with their environment, and each other. The evolutionary history of animal behavior is thus an invaluable window into the evolution of the biosphere, and one which can yield insights not recorded in body fossils.

Fortunately, many facets of animal behavior can be recorded as trace fossils, which are readily preserved in a large range of ancient sedimentary environments. In this project, Dr. Emily Mitchell and Dr. Simon Darroch (Curator of fossil cnidarians, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum) will use the fossil collections housed at Senckenberg to study the evolution of behavioral complexity in a crucial group of trace fossils – 'treptichnids' – and develop novel metrics to quantifying complexity. The insights gained during this exchange will stimulate new collaborative projects, fuel graduate research in our groups, and develop new paleobiological tools that will be welcomed by our academic community.  Together they will address the following questions:

1. How can we quantify the complexity of treptichnid trace fossils, both in terms of burrow architecture, and behavioral sophistication?

2. How does treptichnid complexity change through the ECT? Is this change monotonous, or does progress via step-wise 'pulses' in behavioral innovation?

3. What do these data tell us about the drivers of behavioral evolution over the Ediacaran and Cambrian?

Home Institution: Senckenberg
Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Frankfurt

Institution: University of Cambridge, University Museum, Department of Zoology

For over a century, researchers at the University of Cambridge have used histological techniques to reveal patterns of internal and soft-tissue anatomy which would otherwise remain invisible. This has resulted in an extraordinary array of many thousands of histology slides (thinly-sliced material on glass slides), and hundreds of individuals to which they belong, ranging from lampreys to elephants to the New Zealand tuatara. There is an ongoing digital revolution now occurring in natural history museums, thanks to the growth of computerized tomography. This has made it far easier for students and scientists from all over the world to study materials (e.g., skeletons) digitally, resulting in far-better access to anyone with internet and a computer, not to mention the reduction in the cost and pollution of travel. Histology collections tend to be smaller and more difficult to access than other parts of natural history museums but could similarly benefit from digitization. However, the process of digitizing histology at the Zoological Institute is in its infancy, and relatively few specimens have been photographed at the quality needed by most researchers.

During her fellowship, Lucie Helfmann continued curating and digitizing the Cambridge Histology Collection. She collated and corrected metadata for histological specimens and photographed slices of selected individuals. Besides the digitization, the collection of metadata is of basic importance to enable researchers to determine at a glance if a given specimen (e.g., embryo size, stain used, number of slices, anatomical region sampled, etc.) meets their research needs. The fellowship focused on the evolutionary morphology of mammals. For her Bachelor's and Master's theses, Lucie Helfmann compared different morphological features of fossil and recent specimens to decipher their functions and evolutionary trends, using digitized data. She has just finished her Masters in Geology and Palaeontology and is currently looking for a PhD position. 

Institution: Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsmedien | GEI (Georg Eckert Institut)

Home Institution: Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science, Deutsches Museum Munich

Institution: Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg

Ellen Harlizius-Klück is a Philosopher and Mathematician specialized on (Ancient) Weaving Technology and its mathematical implications.During the Fellowship, she will write a chapter for her book Penelope Counts. Weaving and the order of Matter (working title) to be published in the series ‘Cultural Histories of the Material World’ of Bard Graduate Center, New York. The chapter deals with German linen weavers in Early Modern southern Germany with a focus on their way to design by composition as it is documented in the earliest Weaver books (Ziegler 1677, Lumscher 1708, Frickinger 1740). She will compare this concept of composition to the concept of textura as structure of matter as employed by several scientists in the Early Modern (Descartes, Jungius and Leibniz).

In recent years, studies in the history of knowledge have attached new value to the knowledge of craftspeople of the past. The works of Pamela Long (2011) and Pamela Smith (2022) argue that the empirical values of artisanal work were embedded within a culture that developed new ideas about the natural world culminating in the new sciences of the early modern. Although both authors mention weavers as skilled artisans, weavers do not actually appear in those works as object/subject of analysis. The discussion instead focuses on instrument makers, artists, architects or engineers. A very recent publication by Michael Friedman (2023) on Joachim Jungius’ Texturæ Contemplatio (Meditations on Textures/Weaves, mid 17^th century) seems to close this gap. The book is remarkable in that it concentrates on the subject of mathematics as the discipline possibly transformed by the investigations of the structure and composition of weaves. However, in the end the book demonstrates how regimes of evidence established by the history of technology and science prevent to value the knowledge of weavers in the past: when arguably looking at the practice of weaving, it concentrates on technical innovations (the stocking-frame; the ribbon-loom) as representing weaving on a global scale, and the German pattern books (Ziegler, Lumscher and some manuscripts) as well as the earliest looms with binary control (Trommelmaschine, Bröselmaschine, even before the invention of the Jacquard loom, see Harlizius-Klück 2017) representing a local scale without much impact beyond their region of origin.

Instead, Harlizius-Klück claims that we need to assess our evidence regimes first if we aim to value knowledge of the past and of understudied professionals or artisans when we want to understand how concepts travel and how new ideas were introduced by looking at types of knowledge that we today do not count as scientific. Contrary to the classification as tools or notations of only local significance, the weaver books and the German linen weaving tradition had impact all across the world, visible not only in the fact that painters like Velazquez, El Greco or Titian use the diaper linens described in those books as canvas for their masterpieces (Loermans 2023; Harlizius-Klück “Patterned Canvasses”, forthcoming), but also in the fact that those books, rare as they are today, are held in libraries of art schools all over the world (copies exist not only in Europe but also in Jerusalem, the United States, in Canada, in Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, brought along by immigrating weavers).

Home Institution: Amerika-Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München 

Institution: Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF)

Andreas Etges is a historian and German studies scholar and Senior Lecturer in American Cultural History at the LMU in Munich. During his stay at the ZZF he is planning to pursue two projects that deal with history and memory in Germany and the Unites States.

One of the projects is an article titled “’Honorable Men’: General Robert E. Lee, Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel, and the Memory and Forgetting of Defeat and Guilt” that shall be published in the next issue of USAbroad - Journal of American History and Politics that focuses on “The Role of Public History Within and Outside the United States: Critical Reflections.” The article analyzes the special places Lee and Rommel have occupied in the memories of the American Civil War and World War II, respectively. It will argue that to find something honorable in all the evil of lost wars that were fought for the wrong ends can also be regarded as an individual and collective way to deal with pain, guilt, and defeat. Part of this is honoring the soldiers and their sacrifices, focus on famous battles, and celebrate distinguished generals while ignoring and “forgetting” what the real goals of these wars had been. 

Dr. Andreas Etges and Dr. Irmgard Zündorf of the ZZF are among the main organizers of a planned conference and travel project on history and memory in Germany and the United States. The project shall provide a deep comparative look at how the two societies have dealt with their difficult pasts (e.g. memory cultures, policies, and current challenges like racism and growing antisemitism, failures and best practices). The plan is to organize and finance two week-long “sessions” in 2025 (Germany in the spring, United States in the fall) for about 50 scholars and teachers, museum curators and other public historians, people working in foundations and activists from both countries that include conference-style sessions, public events as well as visits to sites and museums. 
Key partners are the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, the Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft (EVZ), the Smithsonian Institution, the National Park Service, the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, Georgia, the German Historical Institute in Washington, the American Historical Association and the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. Together with Irmgard Zündorf, Andreas Etges will write a major grant application and work on the details of the German itinerary and program.

Home institution: Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe“, University of Vienna

Institution: ZZF

What role did the memory of the People’s Liberation War play in exchanges between Yugoslavia and Africa? How did the transfer of knowledge in the sphere of war commemoration function? What are the reception, appropriation and traces of these exchanges in postcolonial contexts? The project explores the role of war memory in the contacts between Yugoslav Partisans and anti-colonial liberation movements from Africa during and after decolonisation. The project centres on Algeria as the primary case study but also traces the later cooperation with the liberation movements of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. Bringing together the approaches of transnational history and memory studies with a focus on the agency of war veterans, this project aims at writing memory into the global history of Yugoslavia and the Cold War.

Jelena Đureinović is a historian interested in memory politics and memory cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is the scientific coordinator of the Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna and a researcher at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET). Her current project, funded through the APART-GSK Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, investigates Yugoslav socialist internationalism and the global history of the Yugoslav culture of remembrance, focusing on the role of memory in the relations between the Yugoslav Partisan veterans and anti-colonial liberation movements from Africa. Her main research interests include memory studies, global history and the history of Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav space. She holds a PhD in History from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. Her book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution was published with Routledge in 2020.

Home Institution: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw

Institution: Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF)

Anna Wylegała is a sociologist and Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on the social history of the II World War and the immediate postwar period. She is also interested in the qualitative methodology of social research and oral history. She is an author of “Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine” (2019) and “Był dwór, nie ma dworu. Reforma rolna w Polsce” [There was an estate, there is no estate any more. Agricultural reform in Poland] (2021). She also co-edited two other volumes: “The Burden of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine” (2020), and “No Neighbors’ Lands: Vanishing Others in Postwar Europe”. 

During her stay in ZZF, she will focus on her current research project devoted to documenting the Ukrainian experience of the Russian full-scale invasion. Wylegała is a coordinator of the Polish part of the project "24.02.2022, 5 am: Testimonies from the War" (https://swiadectwawojny2022.org/en/), an international initiative that as of March 2024, gathered more than 500 interviews and plans to continue the documentation as longitudinal research project, conducting the second round of interviews. Right now, the project team is working on the methodology of the second round of interviews, solving issues of sensitive information assessment and management, ensuring the participatory character of the research and developing a plan for the future collection access for the general public.

Home Institution: Institut für Landesgeschichte/ Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle/Saale

Institution: Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin (IfZ)

Yves Müller ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Landesgeschichte/ Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt in Halle/Saale. Hier ist er mit dem BMBF-geförderten Projekt „Institutioneller Rassismus in den Sicherheitsbehörden der DDR am Beispiel der Bezirke Magdeburg und Halle, 1949 – 1989/90“ (IRiS) befasst. Er hat an der Universität Hamburg zur nationalsozialistischen „Sturmabteilung“ (SA) im Zweiten Weltkrieg promoviert und ist u. a. Mitbegründer des Zeithistorischen Arbeitskreises Extreme Rechte (ZAER). Forschungs- und Arbeitsschwerpunkte umfassen politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, Männlichkeiten im Nationalsozialismus, extreme Rechte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Erinnerungskultur und -politik in der DDR und Polizeigeschichte.

Im Rahmen des Leibniz-Fellowships „Value of the Past“ hält sich Yves Müller im April 2024 am Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin auf. Unter dem Titel „Der Anti-Nazi. Kurt Hirsch (1913–1999) und die Bewältigung der Gegenwart“wird er einen Beitrag zur deutschen Zeitgeschichte leisten. Thematisch bewegt sich das avisierte Projekt im Grenzbereich zwischen der Nachgeschichte des Holocaust und der Geschichte von Holocaust Survivors sowie als Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart im Bereich der bundesrepublikanischen Zeit- und Demokratiegeschichte. Darüber hinaus bieten sich auch Anknüpfungspunkte in der zeithistorischen Rechtsextremismusforschung sowie der Kommunismusforschung.

Home institution: Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

Institute: Bergbaumuseum, Bochum

Amelia Hutchinson is a doctoral researcher and Harding Distinguished Postgraduate scholar at the University of Cambridge. She is currently writing her thesis on therapeutic and sensory experiences of matter in the kunstkammer. Amelia has received a BA in History and an MPhil in Early Modern History from Trinity College, Cambridge. Her doctoral work, focussing on the relationship between materiality and experiences of the body, extends the themes of her master’s thesis: Skin, Materials and Medicine in Northern Renaissance Artwork. She convenes the Cambridge Material Culture Workshop, promoting interdisciplinary research regarding early modern materiality.

Early modern mining practices were heavily dependent on an inextricable relationship between body and matter: or, put differently, micro- and macrocosm. They relied upon the body as a mode of identification, using sensory processes and experiences to gauge important technical information. This project will explore the rich collections of the Bergbaumuseum – underutilised in terms of their early modern holdings – to consider the ways in which various groups of early modern actors saw diversity and harmony as central markers of a healthy natural environment, and to what extent they drew connections between the internal body, internal bowels of the earth, and the external natural landscape. The Bergbaumuseum holdings include many evocative sources, including allegorical paintings, depictions of St. Barbara (patron saint of miners), technical instruments, mining coins and medals, and alchemical books, spanning the period c.1700-1800. Despite the museum’s holdings overwhelmingly focusing on the post-industrial period, by examining this material we can begin to consider the historicity of productive landscapes. Crucially, it will investigate whether landscapes could be built and rebuilt through human action or divine intervention. At a time when the natural landscape, and the indelible impact of human technologies and activity, is a foremost consideration, such research is fundamental, reflecting on the historical roots of environmental and climatic trauma, and the long history of human engagement with and concern for the productive landscape.

Home Institution: Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe (Marburg)

Institute: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology & The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge)

Tabitha Redepenning, a doctoral researcher and research assistant at the map collection of the Herder Institute, investigates "Urban Authenticity in Szczecin" for her thesis. With a background in Book Science, German Studies (B.A.), and European Studies (M.A.), her interdisciplinary work explores the visual representation of urban spaces and its impact on public discourse about cultural heritage and city landmarks. Focusing on Szczecin's unique position on the German-Polish border, Baltic Sea access, and the effects of World War II destruction and the Polish border shift westwards, Tabitha analyses urban structures through narratives such as touristic trails, exhibitions, guidebooks, and postcards, drawing from post-war discussions on building de- or reconstruction. She emphasises local actors' perspectives in shaping the city's image.

A key player in this context is the National Museum in Szczecin. Tabitha examines its exhibitions, which have portrayed the city as the "Gateway to the Baltic Sea" (Tor zur Ostsee) before 1945 and the "City of the Sea" (miasto morze) in Polish times, highlighting explicit transnational references through ethnographic exhibitions.

With the fellowship, she aims to explore visual representation in unfamiliar places through collections like the photographic collection of the MAA, engage in theoretical discussions on visual history, and learn from methods employed at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Strengthening institutional networks and addressing collection-related challenges, including place naming in metadata, are also key objectives.

Home Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie, LEIZA

Host Institution: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

Home Institution: School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, United Kingdom

Institution: Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS), Erkner

Daniel Siemens is Professor of European History at Newcastle University, UK. He is interested in in the political, cultural and social history of modern Europe in its global entanglements. His latest publication is a special issue of the Journal of Modern European History on ‘Reparations and the Historiography of the Holocaust: An Entangled History’, co-edited with Regula Ludi (2023). Among his latest books are Hinter der Weltbühne: Hermann Budzislawski und das 20. Jahrhundert (Aufbau, 2022) and Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (Yale, 2017). In the academic year 2023-24, Siemens will be one of the leaders of the international research group ‘Paying for the Past? Reparations after the Holocaust in Global Context’ at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS).

As fellow of the IRS in Erkner in 2023, Daniel Siemens worked on the entanglements between German Socialists and Indish Nationalists in the interwar period, exploring how international left-wing journalism provided a platform for encounter, propaganda and political action in Europe and Asia. At the centre of the project is the study of the semi-monthly TheIndustrial and Trade Review for India, later renamed TheIndustrial and Trade Review for Asia. The short-lived periodical was produced in 1920s Berlin by Indian national revolutionaries and German-Jewish socialists with the aim to supporting Indian national liberation from British colonial rule. The editors argued that the struggle of the Asiatic movement against Imperialist domination and exploitation had ‘begun in earnest’ and would be irreversible. For them, Indian home-rule was a project that was embedded in a larger development of Asian (and African) liberation from European and American dominance. The spaces of these imminent changes were necessary transnational – and thus Indian independence more likely to occur if embedded in this wider anti-Imperialist movement. Consequently, the Industrial and Trade Review made contacts with Münzenberg’s League Against Colonial Oppression (later League Against Imperialism), yet it was also financially supported with funds from the German government, who was interested in the Indian market for economic and political reasons.

Home Institution: Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Institution: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München

Dr. des. Nora Jaeger studied art history as well as classical and early Christian archaeology in Münster and Bochum. After a curatorial assistance at the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen on the Rhine, she worked as a research assistant focusing on provenance research and the history of collecting at the Forschungsstelle Provenienzforschung, Kunst- und Kulturgutschutzrechtat the University of Bonn. She completed her dissertation, funded by a doctoral fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, at the Ruhr University Bochum in 2023 with the title "Ein ewig Verbotener" ? - Otto Andreas Schreiber (1907–1978) under National Socialism and after 1945. Nora Jaeger's research interests include provenance research, museum and collection history, and art policy under National Socialism.

Subject of my research within the framework of the Leibniz Fellowship "Value of the Past" is the review and evaluation of the entirely unexplored protocols, interviews, and notes that Hildegard Brenner (b. 1927) created in the context of her publication Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (1963, published in the rowohlt deutsche enzyklopädie). For several decades, Brenner's publication formed an important, indispensable set of standards for art historical research and a fundamental work for the understanding of the art-political actions of power under National Socialism. During the development period of the publication, Brenner held discussions with numerous individuals from the National Socialist art establishment.  Against this background, a critical (re)evaluation of the publication will be undertaken by, on the one hand, examining Brenner's depictions of the past using archival material and, on the other hand, determining to what extent the conversations with contemporary witnesses influenced the contents of the publication. Last but not least, new insights into the functioning and relationship network of the National Socialist art business shall be identified, and based on this, the question of personal continuity lines after 1945 shall be raised.

Home Institution: German Historical Institute in Warsaw

Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam

Dr Bartosz Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk is a researcher at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. He also collaborates with the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and cooperates with the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. He is curator of the exhibition "After the Great War. New Europe 1918-1923”. Previously he was a researcher at the Center for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin as well as Scientific Secretary of the Joint Polish-German Textbook Commission (2012-2016) and lectured at the Vistula Academy (2010-2011). Dr Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk holds a PhD in History (2013) from the Warsaw University and MA in international relations from the Warsaw School of Economics (2007). In his doctorate he studied the monetary policy and parliamentary discourse at the Polish-Lithuanian parliament in the years 1658-1668. He has received scholarships at the Deutsches Polen-Institut and Herder Institute.

Dr Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk researches politics of memory focusing on its foreign perspective, cultural diplomacy and Polish-German relations. His current project analyzes the use of history and memory by Polish diplomacy, and non-official actors towards Germany in the years 1918-1939, which may be called foreign politics of history. The chosen method is based on the research of politics of memory, the theory of soft power and nation branding. Dr Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk researches the history related activities of such actors as the Polish Foreign Office, the Polish Embassy in Berlin and the consulates, selected scientific institutes towards Germany. The tools that were used were press articles, state-sponsored historical exhibitions, film screenings, historians' congresses and publications intended for Germany, holidays and celebrations of Polish institutions in Germany as well as speeches by politicians and diplomats in Germany. Therefore, apart from Polish archives, also the Berlin based archive of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Bundesarchiv are crucial for the project, which is designed to be a habilitation book.  

Home institution: independent institution the European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus (ECLAB)

Institute: Berlin's Leibniz Center for Literature and Culture (ZfL)

Olga Romanova is the independent researcher from Belarus, who has been researching Soviet and post-Soviet culture through the prism of the cinema for more than 10 years, writing articles and essays, reading courses, and speaking in public as an expert. She is currently working on the book "Another History of Soviet Belarusian Cinema. Research Essays”, which will be published in the Dec. of 2023.

The research goal is to gather from the Belarusian films of the different Soviet periods footage open for re-interpretations in the context of the present time. Creating a series of the film shots from the films of different periods (1920s, Stalin's period, Thaw, Brezhnev's "Stagnation" and Perestroika) will allow to dive into the Belarusian history of the Twentieth century, to see different ideological structures, as well as historical complexity, contradictions, traumatism and so-called "white spots". The comments on each film shot will be structured as a description of the cultural, political, and filmic contexts, the extraction of ideological and value messages, as well as their re-interpretation with the discovery of marginal or hidden meanings.

The work on the project consist of the analysis of the Soviet Belarusian films, work with periodicals from 1920-80 in the National Library of Belarus to reconstruct the meanings, which were assigned to the individual films in this or that Soviet period. It also includes the processing of archival documents in the Belarusian State Archives of Literature and Art. The project allows a reader not only to dip into the past, but also to understand the current social processes in Belarus.

Home Institution: School of Translation and Cultural Studies/Institute of Language Studies and Research, Calcutta & Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, India

Institution: Leibniz Institute Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research/ Peace Research Institute (PRIF/HSFK), Frankfurt

Prof. Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha, currently with the School of Translation and Cultural Studies, Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR), Calcutta, has been Professor of English at Kazi Nazrul University, India. He holds a PhD on critical theory and postcolonial interventions from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He did his postgraduation in English literature from the University of North Bengal. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in 2022 and was Fulbright Visiting Fellow 2018-19 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. His recent books include Deleuze and Guattari and Terror (co-edited, Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Social Movements, Media and Civil Society in Contemporary India: Historical Trajectories of Public Protest and Political Mobilization (co-authored, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (co-edited, Routledge, 2019). He co-edits Kairos, the Journal of Critical Symposium and is one of the founding members of the Postcolonial Studies Association of the Global South (PSAGS).

His leibniz project examines how the leitmotif of “national unity” as the normative logic of the political, finds wider popular purchase, fomenting acts of violence when the category of the political is mediated by forceful justification of the singular and the uniform. The past has never been so politically rife in the history of postcolonial India and public sphere debates today have turned into virtual public arenas, causing raucous and violent squabbles, deepening further the social divide on community and religious lines. Scrutinizing the catastrophic function of violence as normative popular will or as legitimate manifestation of people's sovereignty, this project draws on close readings of recent acts of social violence in India. The scope of this project comes within the domain of historical conflicts animated by “cultures of remembrance” or the discursive act of viewing the “Past as a public resource”, or the “litigious value of the past”, hinged on colonial memory and decolonial conflicts.

Home Institution: University of Warsaw/Polish Academy of Sciences

Institution: Leibniz Institut für Europäische Geschichte

Dr. Wieslawa Duzy is an assistant professor (adjunkt) at the Department of Historical Atlas at the Institute of History Polish Academy of Sciences and at the Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw as part of the “People, Places, and Events” project supervised by Francis Harvey (Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig, and Faculty of History, University of Warsaw). Dr Duzy holds a PhD in History (2013), BA in Sociology (2009), MA in History (2007). Scholarship and fellowship holder of, among others, DARIAH (Lisbon 2019), the Herder Institute (Marburg 2018), the Lanckoroński Foundation (London 2015), the Polish Historical Mission (Wuerzburg 2013), the Lithuanian government (Vilnius 2010), EUI (Florence 2007). In 2014-2015 an assistant professor at the Silesian University in Opava. Research interests: social history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, domain ontologies in the Humanities and spatial historical databases.

Dr Duzy is interested in developing research on modelling borders and administrative divisions changing over time. This scope of research is a consequence of two projects she had participated in: “Historical Atlas of Poland in the 2nd Half of the 16th Century” focusing on reconstructing settlement network, and “Ontological foundations for building historical geoinformation systems” focusing on building formal domain ontology of settlements types and administrative units.

The theoretical approach in the project starts from the ‘boundary object’, understood as the entity which can be used by various parties, sharing the same features and simultaneously different semantics. Discussing spatial ordering by administrative divisions modelled in the formal ontology brings historians to the point where various discrepancies may either be hidden as a qualitative value inside the definition or may demand extending the model to non-efficient scale. Dr Duzy is aiming to discuss a possible solution of including discrepancies in spatial ordering into the model by defining them as boundary objects. Drawing on the research tradition of the longue durée she considers the border as an ambiguous concept. The discussion goes from written sources (describing the border with its main features changing over time without indicating exact localization) to cartographic representation (representing static borders with their features including geographical localization).

Home institution: Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (Kyiv, Ukraine)

Institute: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München

Dr Oleksandr Kruglov is an Ukrainian historian, one of the most famous Ukrainian researchers of the Holocaust in the post-Soviet space. In the 1980s, he was one of the first in Ukraine to initiate a systematic study of the Holocaust. Senior adviser of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (Kyiv), scientific consultant of the Ukrainian Institute of Holocaust Studies "Tkuma" (Dnipro). Author of more than 1,180 scientific publications on the history of the Holocaust, including more than 20 monographs and collections of documents, 217 entries in the Holokost na territorii SSSR. Entsiklopedia  (Moskva: ROSSPEN, 2009) and 892 entries in the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vols. II, III, IV (Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis 2012, 2018, 2022).

There are hundreds of publications about the tragedy of Babi Yar. The disadvantage of these publications is that they focus on the victims and says almost nothing about executioners. Hundreds of people from the SD Sonderkommandos, police battalions, SS units, and the Wehrmacht took part in the extermination of Kyiv Jews to one degree or another, while in the available publications about the tragedy of Babi Yar, as a rule, only a few names are mentioned. Thus, hundreds of people who were directly or indirectly involved in the events in Kyiv in the autumn of 1941 remain behind the scenes; they make up approximately 99 percent of all those who in one way or another were involved in the tragedy of Babi Yar. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to identify by names all the executioners – organizers, performers, and accomplices, and to create an objective, complete, and holistic picture of the events in Kyiv in the autumn of 1941.

Home Institution: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

Institution: ZFL

Danijela Lugarić Vukas is a literary scholar and cultural historian who holds a PhD from the University of Zagreb, where she works as an associate professor. She has undergone professional training at the Faculty of Philology (St. Petersburg State University, predoctoral fellowship, Russian Federation Grant, 2006) and at the University of California, Berkeley (postdoctoral fellowship, JFDP, 2011), and she was a virtual open research laboratory associate at the Russian, East European, and Euroasian Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (spring 2022). She was visiting professor (2018-2022) at the Department of Russian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dr Lugarić Vukas is interested in comparative Slavic studies (former Yugoslav and former Soviet cultures), with a focus on contemporary culture and the second half of the 20^th century, particularly on topics such as the paradoxes, complexities, and inner ambivalences of (post)modernity and pluralities of (post)modernist subjectivities, the transition from late socialism to capitalism as and economic, political, social and cultural formation, in the cultural conceptualizations of memory in post-Soviet Russian and late Soviet socialism between myth and trauma, as well as in female prose writers, Russian critical theory, and postcolonial readings of post-Soviet culture. She translates from Russian (M. Bakhtin and a number of contemporary scholars, culturologists, and philosophers, including M. Lipovetsky, A. Etkind, M. Epstein, and I. Kukulin). She has written numerous papers and monographs in the fields of literary and cultural studies in Soviet and Yugoslav (post)socialism, memory studies, trauma studies, femininity and gender history. Apart from researching contemporary Russian and Russophone novels from the 2010s, she is currently translating Oksana Vasyakina's novel Wound.

She intends to use the fellowship to work on a book project titled Temporalities of the Post-Soviet Russophone Novel in the 2010s: Spectres of the Soviet Past, which is informed by two firm beliefs: first, that the topic of time is clearly important in exploring post-Soviet Russophone literature of the 2010s, and second, that the novel offers the richest and most convincing sense of time. Her book project connects various Russophone novels from the 2010s (from Vladimir Sorokin, Mikhail Shiskin, Evgeny Vodolazkin, Sergey Lebedev to Maria Stepanova, Polina Barskova, Liudmila Ulitskaya, Svetlana Alexievich, and Guzel Yakhina) with the framework of temporality. Furthermore, by bringing together discourse-oriented and structurally-focused approaches to the selected literary works, this research aims to provide analyses of novels that are both „tales of time“ (fable du temps) and „tales about time“ (fable sur le temps) (Ricoeur 1985)—that is, in which time is present as both a universal feature of narrative and its topic. With regard to the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is critical to examine the cultural landscape of the system that paved the way for this conflict. As a result, the goal of this project is to provide a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of how political categories and ideological processes are articulated and portrayed in cultural and literary forms in order to evolve into what they truly are. In this sense, the temporalities of literary works, i.e., the ways in which they order and structure the past, present, and future, provide insights into how language corresponded to conceptions of reality and shaped knowledge in Russia during the 2010s, whereas narrative forms take forefront because they serve as a bridge between culture as system and culture as performance, acting as a setting for the formation of meaning. Some of the cases examined in this project demonstrate how the violent Soviet past not only impacts how Russian society views itself today, but also serves to explain the political behaviours we witness today.

Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)

Ole Birk Laursen is a historian of South Asia, anarchism, and anticolonialism. His research concerns the social and intellectual history of South Asian anticolonial activists in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century to the era of decolonisation, with a particular focus on Marxism, anarchism, and left-wing radicalism. He holds a PhD in English from the Open University (UK), and an MA and BA in English and History from the University of Aarhus (Denmark). His first book, Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom (Hurst & Co., 2023), is an intellectual biography of India’s most important anarchist theoretician and activist. The book addresses issues around direct democracy and postcolonial visions of freedom, internationalism and the nation-state, terrorism, pacifism, independence, and decolonisation through the lens of anticolonial anarchism.

During his Leibniz Research Alliance fellowship, he will work on a project entitled ‘Bharat Berlin: Entangled Spaces of Indian Anticolonialism in the Weimar Era’. Taking a spatial-political approach, this project examines the history of Indian anticolonialism in Weimar era Berlin. Analysing primary archival material, intelligence reports, newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and architecture, the project explores issues of communism, anarchism, pacifism, nationalism, and fascism, and how these ideologies and movements influenced the articulation of Indian anticolonialism in exile. It considers questions concerning gender (e.g., the role of women; inter-racial relationships) and religion (e.g., Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews); the involvement of students, intellectuals, and workers; protests against racism and colonialism; the establishment of new organisations and global networks of resistance with Egyptians, Persians, Chinese, and Japanese in exile; expulsions and deportations in the Nazi era, as well as the spaces in which all this unfolded. In doing so, it transforms our understanding of Berlin’s role in the Indian struggle for independence and provokes a reconsideration of the politics and value of representing the past.

Home Institution: Deutsches Museum, München

Institution: Whipple Museum for the History of Science, Cambridge

Julia Bloemer is a historian of science working at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Currently, she curates a new permanent exhibition on the "Nature of the Natural Sciences". After studying physics, she completed her doctorate in the history of science in 2021 at LMU Munich on science in southern German monasteries of the 18th century. Her research focuses on the relationship between science and religion, the history of physics and science communication.

How does science work? How does knowledge about the history of science help us to understand science today? In order to find their way in a world dominated by science and technology, citizens need knowledge to make self-determined judgments. Although this also includes subject-specific content, knowledge about the nature of science such as basic features of knowledge acquisition and the properties of scientific knowledge are even more useful. While the integration of nature of science elements in the classroom has been studied intensively for a long time, the communication in informal learning places like museum exhibitions has hardly been researched yet. This project is part of a larger attempt of the Deutsches Museum to include nature-of-science elements in its exhibitions and investigates the chances and challenges of an historical approach. It focuses on two psychological concepts that have a particular influence on the successful communication of nature-of-science elements: abstraction as deriving abstract themes from individual case studies and transfer as transposing them into a new context. The Whipple Museum for the History of Science in Cambridge offers an ideal environment for the investigation of these questions. On the one hand, it is a decidedly historical museum, so that visitors come here with completely different expectations: not scientific content of today, but history of science. It will therefore be necessary to examine what influence these expectations have on the visitors' ability to abstract and transfer. Furthermore, especially for the nature of science element of theory change, the exhibitions in the subject areas of meteorology (weather forecasting) and astronomy (change of worldview) from the holdings of the Whipple Museum can be fruitfully used.

Home Institution: German Maritime Museum / Leibniz Institute for Maritime History (DSM)

Institute: The Polar Museum, Cambridge 

Katrin Kleemann is an environmental historian and historian of science working on volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and maritime history. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Maritime Museum / Leibniz Institute for Maritime History in Bremerhaven, Germany. Kleemann studied history, cultural anthropology, and geology at the University of Kiel, the Free University of Berlin and LMU Munich. She was a member of the international and interdisciplinary doctoral program "Environment and Society" at the Rachel Carson Center. The Andrea von Braun Foundation funded her doctoral research. Her first monograph, A Mist Connection. An Environmental History of the Laki Eruption of 1783 and Its Legacy, will be published in De Gruyter's "Historical Catastrophe Studies" series in 2022. Before joining the German Maritime Museum, Kleemann was a lecturer at the Department of History at the University of Freiburg and a fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. 

At the German Maritime Museum, Kleemann is pursuing a postdoc project on the history of the German Maritime Observatory (Deutsche Seewarte) that existed in Hamburg from 1875 to 1945. This institute contributed significantly to the ever-expanding breadth of knowledge of oceans and their weather conditions, making shipping safer and quicker. At the Polar Museum of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, Kleemann will be studying their impressive collections. These include the correspondence of British scholars with their German counterparts on topics such as the oceans of the polar regions. The collections also feature an impressive array of photographs of historical expeditions and many scientific instruments. Research with these archival images and objects in the Polar Museum will enable Kleemann to study and evaluate the practices of maritime knowledge production in Germany and the United Kingdom from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, particularly with regard to the polar regions. Furthermore, Kleemann will assess how the German and British expeditions approached maritime surveys in the polar regions, their challenges, and how they overcame them.

Home institution: Senckenberg Museum of Natural History

Institution: University of Cambridge, University Museum, Department of Zoology

Biographical sketch: Heike Reise is a zoologist who studied biology (animal physiology, zoology and ecology) at the University of Leipzig and holds a PhD from the University of Basel. For more than 30 years, she has been employed at the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History Görlitz as a researcher and curator of the Mollusca collection. She is an expert on terrestrial slugs and is coeditor of the journal Archiv für Molluskenkunde.

Project description: The British zoologist Walter E. Collinge (1867–1947) was an eminent malacologist who spent the first part of his career on the study of molluscs, particularly terrestrial slugs. In that time, he accumulated a considerable slug collection, which he later donated to the University of Cambridge. Slugs are snails without external shells, and they have to be preserved in alcohol, which is more effort than creating a shell collection. In many old mollusc collections, slug samples, if they were included at all, have dried out at some stage, leaving the specimens more or less useless. The Collinge collection has likely been well curated since handed over by Collinge so that its specimens may be in a good enough state to be reinvestigated and determined anatomically even more than 110 years since collected. This Collinge collection is particularly important for two reasons. (1) It contains many type specimens or potential types, that is specimens on which new species descriptions are based (Collinge named 70 new slug species). (2) It is likely to contain voucher specimens for early distribution records of slug species, some of which have spread dramatically in the last century, whereas  others may have locally disappeared. The fellowship will be used for reinvestigating the slugs of the Collinge collection to produce a species list in agreement with current taxonomy, and to identify type specimens. The material will also be screened for potentially interesting voucher specimens. Two weeks will not suffice to dissect all material, so I will concentrate on European and North American slug groups. The list to be published will provide a basis for other malacologists interested in material in the Collinge collection.

Institute: Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute

Drawing on an interdisciplinary background, Önder Cetin has focused on the role of educational media in the construction of identities, images of the self and the other, and intercommunal relationships since his doctoral research at Leiden University (2011). In addition to textbook studies, his research interests include the role of emotions and nostalgia in the construction of collective identities. The findings and conclusions of his recent projects, for example, were primarily shared through peer-reviewed publications such as the British Journal of Educational Studies (2022), and the Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society (2020), as well as forthcoming publications on the memory politics of the Turkish Jewish community and the use of emotions in the construction of self-image in Turkish textbooks published in Germany to be published in the Memory Studies and the Journal of Muslims in Europe, respectively in  2023.

In his one-month research project for the "Value of the Past" fellowship, Cetin will focus on identifying major digital actors, including their motivations, strategies and main products, that challenge official narratives, as presented in textbooks for secondary schools, by proposing alternative or complementary narratives with a focus on local history via online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

In addition to developing a long-term research project proposal based on the preliminary findings achieved during this short-term research fellowship, he will present the initial conclusions from his research at the 7th Annual Meeting of the Memory Studies Association, focusing on "Communities and Change," at New Castle University (UK) in July 2023, which is planned to result in a peer-reviewed publication.

Home Institution: Wissenschaftsgeschichte / History of Science, University of Regensburg; Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Deutsches Museum Munich

Institution: Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung – Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research (SGN), Frankfurt

Biographical sketch:

Christopher Halm is a historian of science who holds a PhD from the University of Regensburg. He studied chemistry, history and geography at Heidelberg University and is a trained grammar school teacher. His dissertation on the early history of agricultural chemistry was awarded by the German Chemical Society. Christopher has received various fellowships, e.g. from the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin and the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.

Project description:

On July 24, 1969, for the first time in history, a human mission brought selected rock samples from a celestial body to planet Earth. Sampling the moon initiated research programs and museum exhibitions that are still running today but whose history has yet to be told. Christopher’s second book project will change that. It is conceived as a material and media culture study that builds upon archival research, oral history approaches, and collaborations with museums, libraries and science institutes. His study reviews the cultural, global, and techno-scientific value/history of moon rocks. He argues that researching and exhibiting lunar samples has fostered a Western science- and technology-interested community. New national and commercial space programs, however, challenge this community. Not only is our view of the moon changing, but our self-image, our history and the value of our past are changing.

Christopher uses the Leibniz Fellowship to research the history of Senckenberg’s in-house lunar sample object. How does the history of this particular piece resemble or differ from the histories of other lunar samples? What messages are given, and what possible futures lie ahead for Senckenberg's moon rock?

Home Institution: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (HIS)

Institution: ZZF

Bibliographical sketch: Julia Hörath is a historically working political scientist. She studied History and Political Science at the University of Osnabrück and Free University Berlin. From 2006 to 2009 she participated in the PhD-program at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London, and received her PhD in political science from Free University Berlin. Her dissertation on the so-called ‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’ in the pre-war Nazi concentration camps has been awarded the Herbert-Steiner-Price 2013. Julia Hörath has been working as a research assistant for several memorial sites, e.g. the Sachsenhausen and the Ravensbrück Memorial, and was lecturer at the Humboldt University Berlin. Since 2017 she is researcher at Hamburg Institute for Social Research where she is working on her project on the history of the West-German New Left.

Project: The project explores the changing notions of progress and future in the West-German New Left during last third of the 20th century. It relates to recent historical studies on time, temporality and historical futures as well as to the research on the transformation of Germany after the break down of the so-called “real socialism” and the reunion of the two German states. Asking how the changes of the New Left in the Federal Republic were influenced by the transitions in the GDR it aims to contribute to the current debate on the “cotransformation” (Philipp Ther).

Historians regard the last three decades of the 20th century as a phase of deep structural and cultural transformation, captured in concepts such as the “trente glorieuses” respectively the “history after the boom” as well as in the debates on the cesura of “1989”. If we follow contemporary perceptions of these changes, one impact had been an increasing skepticism towards social progress and economic growth and a loss of social utopias. Many contemporaries were under the impression that the prospect of a radiant future, that so far had characterized modern thought, was replaced by the notion of a “closed” of even “apocalyptic” future beyond any influence of human action.

The idea of progress and the utopia of a better future, both encapsulated in the terms “socialism” resp. “communism”, formed key concepts of the West-German New Left. Thus, the increasing skepticism towards such notions threatened the very foundation of its political thoughts. The project investigates how these shifts were influenced by the developments of “real socialism” in the eastern part of Germany and how they were perceived and processed in the West-German New Left. It thereby addresses both, the organizational level and the level of collective biographies. The analysis will be guided by the categories experience, expectation (Reinhart Koselleck), and disappointment (Bernhard Gotto et.al.). On one hand, the study shall investigate how the varying relationships between these three categories shaped conceptions of time. On the other, it pursues the question of how disappointing experiences might have shifted future expectations. Thirdly, the project asks how this, over time, might have influenced socialist ideas more generally.

The study aims to combine a social and cultural history of the transformed West-German New Left with a contribution to the history of ideas and intellectuals in the Federal Republic. In addition, it will shed light on processes of “cotransformation” in West Germany.

Home Institution: Department for the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine, Centre for Health and Society, Medical Faculty, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Institution: Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), Munich

Biographical sketch: Matthis Krischel is a historian of medicine and the life sciences and a medical ethicist. He received his PhD in history and philosophy of medicine from Ulm University (Germany) in 2013. He is lecturer at the Depart for the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and a member of the clinical ethics committee of University Hospital of Düsseldorf.

Project description: As fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History between July and August 2022, Matthis will explore the relationship of the history of medicine and the life sciences with bioethics. What can we learn from problematic episodes in this history, such as collection of anthropological specimens and their display in museums during the colonial era, medical crimes in Nazi Germany and drug trials sponsored by West German pharmaceutical companies and carried out in East Germany? And on the other hand, how can we adequately write about the ethical aspects of these episodes without falling into either of the extremes of moral relativism or anachronism? Who can these aspects be incorporated into cultures of remembrance?

The aim of the fellowship is to form a network of historians, bioethicists, philosophers and legal historians to further discuss these topics. Matthis is very happy to connect with members of the network “Values of the Past” who are interested in discussing the relationship between history of medicine and the life sciences, bioethics and cultures of remembrance.

Home Institution: LMU München

Institute: ZZF

In the late 1950s and 1960s, Soviet public opinion was preoccupied with the search for authenticity. The disclosure of the Stalinist crimes stimulated a revision of the established patterns of perception and interpretation, while political identities also began to rearrange themselves during this upheaval. Questions of history play a decisive role in this. Although the leading proponents of the struggle for “historical truth” initially sought to resolidify the state’s socialist values, this undertaking soon became critical towards the official narrative and ideology. Two camps emerged: the “liberals” criticized Stalinism and called for the democratization of society, while their “conservative” opponents called for a gentle course of reform. This project is intended to open up the entanglement between discussions about the collective past and ideological polarization. Based on the work of Belarusian prose writer Vasil Bykau (1924–2003), I will show how the past—strictly speaking, rival interpretations of it—became a source and projection screen for ideological conflicts.

Following the seminal work of Amir Weiner (2002), I will discuss the political meaning of the Soviet memory of war. The past is thus understood as a resource in various ideological conflicts, in which it is used to underpin rival political visions. Different interpretations of what happened during the war were an important topic in the broad discussion about the future of the Soviet system and socialism. Weiner traces how participants in this commemoration understood the war as a continuation of the revolutionary longing for moral homogeneity. In this way, the history of the war was about freeing the collective body from “foreign elements and internal enemies”, so that a society of harmony and freedom from conflict would finally be possible. As a result, war became another element in the complex ideological battle underlying the Soviet creation of the “new man”. This was the context in which Bykau and other “liberals” had to develop their own understanding of the war based on the notions of ideological pluralism, socialist democracy, and true humanism.

Home Institution: TU Berlin

Institute: ZZF

Sebastian Willert is a historian and research associate at the Chair for Modern Art History at TU Berlin. He received his PhD in Art History in 2022 from the TU Berlin with a dissertation (“Kulturbesitz. Archäologische Objekte als Konfliktfaktor der deutschen und osmanischen Politik, 1898–1918.“) From 2017 to 2021, he was a doctoral student at Excellence Cluster Topoi. In the same time span, he participated in the program Ancient Object(s) and Visual Studies (AOVis) at the Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies (BerGSAS). He was a PreDoc-Fellow in the Research Cluster Translocations at TU Berlin. In 2021 he was affiliated with the Orient-Institute Istanbul and Boğaziçi University’s Department of History in Istanbul. Within the framework of Global, Colonial and Transnational History, his projects aim to analyse the impacts of cultural appropriations, exhibitions, and museum narratives on international relations and the public.

The First World War marked a caesura in the old order of states and empires. In its aftermath, political and geographical frameworks transformed, while exhibitions of prestigious ancient objects continued to visualise the cultural significance of a city or a nation. Various museum actors, colonial agents and archaeologists in Europe and the Middle East managed to manifest their positions despite geopolitical transformation(s) and regime change(s). Personal continuities shaped museums, universities, and research institutes. At the same time, similar discourses related to the exhibitions of ancient art became apparent in various geographical areas. Exhibitions served as ordering structures to vault regional diversities and construct national/ideological unity. To achieve this, actors resorted to imperial tools. While museums were opened in Damascus (1919/1936–39), Aleppo (1931), and Beirut (1937), cultural assets from the region were continuously displayed in Germany and France: Case studies like the Baalbek exhibition in Jena (1925), the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (1930), the Paris International Colonial Exhibition with its Pavilions from Algeria, Syria, and Lebanon, eventually, the exhibition of Byzantine art in the French capital (both 1931) indicate a cultural pattern of exhibiting assets. From a transnational perspective, the research project focuses on how ancient art was valorised and presented in a period of transformation? Did the value(s) of cultural assets change? Were displays modified according to (geo-)political contexts? The study aims to analyse cultural practices during the inter-war period. It studies the construction of national identities by depicting specific cultural objects. Investigating the processes of valuing and re-valuing particular objects, the project asks about implemented symbolisms constructing political caesura(e) and/or continuity as a coherent history.

Home Institution: Humboldt-Universität Berlin

Institution: ZZF Potsdam

Andrei Zavadski is an interdisciplinary scholar working at intersections of memory studies, public history, museum studies, and media studies. Until July 2022, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He holds a dual MA in public history from the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and Manchester University (2014) and a PhD in media and communication studies from Freie Universität Berlin (2020). He is a co-editor of Politika affekta: Muzei kak prostranstvo publichnoi istorii [Politics of Affect: The Museum as a Public History Space] (2019) and of  Vse v proshlom: teoriya i praktika publichnoi istorii [All Things Past: Theory and Practice of Public History] (2021). His work has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, Europe-AsiaStudies, Problems of Post-Communism, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, and other journals. 

During his Leibniz Fellowship, Andrei will work on a project titled ‘Public History in Putin’s Russia: In Search of Postcoloniality.’ Set within the discipline of public history, with approaches of memory studies and media studies as auxiliary, the project will use a postcolonial lens as a principal epistemological tool. It will analyse the usage of the past as a way to mobilise people in contemporary Russia in general and in the official propaganda of the current war in Ukraine in particular. It will aim to highlight instances of resistance to these efforts, both since 24 February 2022 and over a longer period of time. The analysis will also seek to uncover postcolonial perspectives that are coming to the fore in attempts to oppose imperialist historical arguments of Russia’s political leadership, and will thus contribute to thinking about potential transformations that will need to happen in this regard in the future. The more abstract aims of this research are to explore public histories in Russia in the contexts of the current war as well as of the regional and global public histories, and to offer a new postcolonial trajectory of their development. This research will constitute part of a book tentatively titled Public Histories in Russia, on which Andrei is working in collaboration with historian Vera Dubina.

Home Institution: Vanderbilt University

Institute: ZZF

Institute: ZZF

Home Institution: German Maritime Museum, Bremerhaven

Institute: The Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge

Charlotte Colding Smith works on the examination of whaling records and artefacts through the study of whaling logbooks in the collection archives.

Home Institution: Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt

Institute: Museum of Zoology, Cambridge

Franziska Wagner is a biologist who has specialized in comparative anatomy, functional morphology, evolution, and systematics of mammals and other vertebrates. She is writing her PhD thesis at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main and worked as a guest researcher at the Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Frankfurt in the Section of Mammalogy. During her Master studies and PhD studies she visited mammal collections in Germany, Switzerland, and France and learned about their curatorial practice. She regularly presents her project on scientific meetings and publishes articles in academic journals. Since summer 2019 she works as a scientific trainee at the Senckenberg Naturhistorische Sammlungen Dresden to intense her qualifications in research, curatorial work, and public relations.

In her project Franziska Wagner analyses the consequences of the breeding of different snout lengths on intranasal structures i.e., the turbinals (skeleton of nasal conchae) in the domestic dog by the use of high-resolution computed tomography (µCT). With modern imaging techniques intracranial structures can be investigated non-destructively which offers the opportunity to study collection specimens of rare and endangered species, and even fossils. The skulls of the chosen dogs cover different ages and breeds, and the Eurasian wolf as the dog's ancestor serves for outgroup comparison. Based on the resulting µCT cross-sections of the nasal cavity virtual 3D models of selected structures are reconstructed. The data is analyzed morphologically and morphometrically. The turbinal skeleton of modern dogs differs from the Eurasian wolf, especially in brachycephalic (short snouted) breeds like the pug. Sighthounds by contrast are a group of dolichocephalic (long snouted) eye-hunting racing dogs of ancient origin whose turbinals are as well-developed as in the Eurasian wolf or in scent hounds like the German shepherd. Most modern breeds are affected by a strong inbreeding with genetic drift. By just comparing these morphologically extremely diversified forms with the wild Eurasian wolf several key elements of domestication over hundreds of dog generations are at risk of non-consideration. Hence, the general influences of a formerly more natural selection on the dog need to be evaluated on intermediate stages. The Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge for example houses skulls of dogs excavated in mummy pits. These individuals are supposed to represent an evolutionary connection between the wolf and 'incipient dogs', and the artificially selected pedigree dogs of today. A comparison of these Egyptian dogs to wild wolves from Lebanon, also present in the collection, and to the modern dog specimens can demonstrate how domestication has proceeded over the last centuries.

Home Institution: Deutsches Museum Munich 

Institute: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge | June 2019

Artemis Yagou is an Athens-born historian of design and technology, currently based in Munich, Germany, where she is Research Associate at the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Deutsches Museum. She is working on the project "How they Played: Children and Construction Toys (ca. 1840-1940)", with funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) (2016-2021). Additionally, she is preparing a monograph on aspects of luxury in early modern Southeastern Europe. She has published extensively, including Fragile Innovation: Episodes in Greek Design History (2011 in English/2015 in Greek).

Exploring the material culture of the long eighteenth century, Yagou examined four pocket watches with Ottoman numerals from the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum. English and continental firms produced large numbers of watches of this type for the markets of the Ottoman Empire. These products, both technical novelties and fashionable accessories, were highly popular among the local multiethnic populations. The pocket watches for the Ottoman market may be classified as examples of popular luxury, expressing the rise of the individual, the growing significance of pleasurable consumption, and the emergence of new forms of socialisation through product use. Furthermore, these watches often combined elements that may be described as "genuine" or "fake", which suggests that various forms and degrees of authenticity should be considered and problematised. The quantity-produced pocket watch with Ottoman numerals, an artefact incorporating both innovation and fashionability, offers an appropriate starting point for exploring the diffusion and significance of forgery practices outside the domain of high luxury.

Home Institution: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge

Institute: Deutsches Museum Munich| November 2019

Joshua Nall is Curator of Modern Sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge. He joined the museum in 2013, having previously completed his MPhil and PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. His research focuses on mass media and material culture of the physical sciences after 1800. He has curated a variety of exhibitions and displays, including on globes, science and industry in Cambridge, and most recently the special exhibition Astronomy and Empire. His first book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860–1910, will be published by University of Pittsburgh Press in September 2019. With Boris Jardine he is also currently editing a primary source volume, Victorian Material Culture: Science and Medicine, to be published by Routledge.

Nall will use his Cambridge-Leibniz Museum & Collection Fellowship to support a research exchange between the Whipple Museum and the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Since 2013 he has been part of a research project critically reassessing the thorny question of fake scientific instruments in major museum collections, including the Whipple Museum. Using a variety of historical, curatorial, and scientific techniques, including X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy, this initial research has already increased the number of known forgeries in the Whipple’s collection. With support from the Cambridge-Leibniz-Museum and Collection Fellowships 2019, this study will be improved and extended by facilitating a partnership between the Whipple Museum and Dr. Neeti Phatak, a materials science specialist working with the Deutsches Museum collection. Dr Phatak will visit the Whipple in the summer of 2019 to assist in further XRF analysis of the collection and to share her expertise in the complicated interpretation of resultant data. Nall will then undertake a reciprocal visit in the winter of 2019 to share his own curatorial and historical insights with the research and conservation teams at the Deutsches Museum. Our ambition is to establish baseline working techniques for the accumulation and interpretation of large quantities of XRF data across many different types of objects in multiple collections. This technique offers the tantalising opportunity to not only weed our forgeries, but also to help better date authentic instruments and interrogate their place of origin and the material techniques used in their construction, offering new insights into the making and circulation of scientific instruments.

Home Institution: Deutsches Museum Munich 

Institute: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge | August 2019

Neeti Phatak pursued her Doctorate in Materials Science & Engineering from the University of Augsburg, Germany in 2016. She has a broad experience in the research and development of new and existing materials and their characterization – both in industry and academia- nationally and internationally. As a passionate material scientist, Neet Phatak is always keen and enthusiastic towards exploring varying domains where she could contribute her expertise in solving diverse problems.

Being associated with the Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany, since more than a year, she has been actively involved in the material characterization of various museum artefctas via non-destructive techniques, as X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) Spectroscopy- aiming in bringing together the scientific and historical aspects in the analysis of museum artefcats for their authenticity and provenance.

Cambridge-Leibniz Museum & Collection Fellowship would be a great opportunity for Neeti in exploring the potentials of the XRF technique in the analysis of diverse museum artefacts- not only at the Deutsches Museums, Munich, but as well at the Whipple Museum, University of Cambridge. With support from the Cambridge-Leibniz-Museum and Collection Fellowships 2019, this study will be improved and extended by facilitating a partnership between the Deutsches Museum and Dr.Joshua Nall, a historian and curator at the Whipple Musuem. Dr Phatak will visit the Whipple in the summer of 2019 to assist in further XRF analysis of the collection and to share her expertise in the complicated interpretation of resultant data. Nall will then undertake a reciprocal visit in the winter of 2019 to share his own curatorial and historical insights with the research and conservation teams at the Deutsches Museum. Our ambition is to establish baseline working techniques for the accumulation and interpretation of large quantities of XRF data across many different types of objects in multiple collections. This technique offers the tantalising opportunity to not only weed our forgeries, but also to help better date authentic instruments and interrogate their place of origin and the material techniques used in their construction, offering new insights into the making and circulation of scientific instruments.

Home Institution & Institute: The Polar Museum, SPRI, Cambridge | German Maritime Museum, Bremerhaven

Charlotte Connelly is a curator of science, technology and the environment at the Polar Museum, part of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. Her current research in the history of science investigates the material culture of the physical sciences, and how recreation of past experimental practice can inform historical interpretation. She has published on the history of science and exploration, as well as on museology and how museum practice can be used to build dialogue between different types of audience, particularly with reference to climate science.

Martin Weiss is a historian of science at the German Maritime Museum / Leibniz Institute for Maritime History. In his current research he focuses on the history of the polar and marine sciences in the Cold War. The history of German research vessels serve as a point of departure for his historical analysis of the many interests (scientific, economic, geo-strategic) that came into play (and still come into play today) in determining the agenda and the public impact of polar and marine research. Previously, Martin focused on the history of museums as centres of knowledge exchange, both in Cold War East Germany and nineteenth century Holland. He is the author of the book „Showcasing Science – A History of Teylers Museum in the Nineteenth Century“.

In a new exhibition project, The Polar Museum and the German Maritime Museum are seeking to develop an exhibition, H2O: Ice, Oceans and Us (working title), about climate change and its impacts on our planet, in collaboration with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The project will help tackle one of the biggest challenges museums face in conveying climate change issues: identifying engaging and comprehensible objects which document and illustrate the research underlying climate science, climate history and its predicted future effects on society. To this end, a best practice guide will be compiled.

Home Institution: German Center for Marine Biodiversity Research (DZMB), Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg

Institute: Museum of Zoology, Cambridge| September 2019

James Taylor is a marine ecologist who completed his Master’s studies at the University of Glasgow before undertaking his Doctoral research at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven in association with the Carl von Ossietzky Universität, Oldenburg. Taylor’s research interests include deep-sea macro- and megafaunal community analysis, video and imagery techniques for studying marine realms, genetics, and hydrothermal vent associated fauna. His doctoral dissertation titled “Temporal and Spatial Variability of Epibenthic Megafaunal Communities from the Arctic Deep-Sea LTER Observatory HAUSGARTEN” studied variation in megafaunal communities with data spanning more than a decade with particular emphasis on the deep-sea holothurians, Kolga hyalina and Elpidia heckeri, as well as the mollusc Mohnia mohni. This work was funded by a Research Grant for Doctoral Candidates and Young Academics and Scientists from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Taylor’s current post-doctoral research focuses on the study of material, both physical and image based, obtained during the IceAGE RR (Icelandic marine Animals: Genetics and Ecology – Reykjanes Ridge) expedition MSM75. Whilst this encompasses many areas of research, a key focus lies with the molecular, morphological, scleroclimatological, habitat and stable isotope analysis of the acorn barnacle Bathylasma hirsutum. B. hirsutum is known from the Azores to the Faeroe Islands in water depth of 200 m to 1829 m and has been observed on bedrock in high current areas, with further information on this species very limited. The awarded fellowship will directly address providing further information on the morphology of Bhirsutum in collaboration with the Cambridge Museum of Zoology via Micro-CT scanning and reconstruction techniques. The fellowship will also involve the donation of Bhirsutum specimens from the MSM75 expedition to the extensive Cirripedia collection at the museum, which also houses the historical Darwin barnacle specimens.