Cohort 9

Spiros is a queer poet and media scholar with research interests in the relationship between television and its audiences, queer anthropology, and the representational politics of fatness. Since earning his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2021, he has held postdoctoral and visiting research fellowships at the University of Amsterdam and Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. He is currently a fellow at the Research Centre in Humanities, preparing a project for submission to a European funding body.

Spiros has written extensively on Greek television, with an upcoming book titled Greek Television Comedy: Queer(y)ing a Canon. His publications on Greek LGBTQI+ cinema, Anglophone television, and celebrity studies have appeared in journals such as VIEW: Journal of European Television History & Culture, Journal of Greek Film Studies, and various (inter)national anthologies. His poetry collection, The Merman and Other Creatures, was published in June 2023 and nominated for the Best Debut Poetry Award.

At KWI, Spiros plans to work on his first edited volume, provisionally titled Humor and Its Political Affordances: From Nostalgia to Cancel Cultures. This collection, initiated after a two-day workshop organized at the University of Amsterdam, shifts away from the Anglo-centric approach that has prevailed in the field, exploring perspectives and understandings of humor from Europe and other parts of the world.

Veronica Ferreri is a Global Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice’s Department of Humanities and the University of Waterloo’s Department of Anthropology. She earned her PhD from SOAS, University of London, with a PhD thesis entitled A State of Permanent Loss: War and Displacement in Syria and Lebanon (2018),which was awarded the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize by BRISMES in 2019. Part of her PhD project and postdoctoral research (ZMO-Berlin) became the basis for her trilogy of articles about Syrian displacement into Lebanon that retraces the transformation of the Syrian presence from revolutionary solidarity to protracted crisis. Another research strand of her research deals with paperwork and bureaucracy between Syria and Lebanon, Syria and Germany which converged in her current project “Archive in Times of War”, which examines archives of legal documents and their imbrications in families’ relations of care and national histories of political violence. During her stay at the KWI, Veronica will work on her first monograph entitled The Aftermath of War: Survival and Displacement across the Syrian-Lebanese Border. Her work appears in Citizenship Studies, Society & Conflict, History & Anthropology and Allegra Lab.

Ádám Havas is a sociologist whose interests lie at the intersection of cultural sociology, postcolonial studies, and popular music studies. In his empirical research, he combines global comparative historical perspectives with qualitative methods, most notably ethnography and participant listening. Between 2022 and 2024, he held a Marie S. Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Barcelona, Department of Sociology, Centre for the Study of Culture, Politics, and Society (CECUPS). The project compared improvised music scenes in Spain, the UK, and Hungary, with a special emphasis on Latin American and Romani diasporas.

He was Chair of IASPM-Hungary (2018–2020) and is currently a member of IASPM-AL, the editorial board of Jazz Research Journal (Equinox), and Replika social science quarterly. He co-edited a special issue of Popular Music and Society on global jazz diasporas with Bruce Johnson and is coeditor of the Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies (Havas, Johnson, and Horn, 2025). His book, The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora, was published in 2022 by Routledge. His publications have appeared in Popular Music, Jazz Research Journal, and Jazz Research News, among others. Ádám is a keen advocate for academic autonomy and a global perspective on structural inequalities and social change.

As a KWI International Fellow, Ádám will be developing a research grant proposal focusing on a comparative empirical study about music and migration in Afro-Latin Iberia and the Balkans, with a special emphasis on the role of “race”, identity politics, and improvised strategies of survival. He will also work on three articles covering themes such as Barcelona’s contemporary avant-garde scene, “blackness” in East-Central European popular music, and jazz in Hungary in World War II. He will assist in finalizing Vol. 14 of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Finally, he looks forward to hosting an event under the broad topic “creolizing cultural sociology” with the participation of international scholars.

Kristina Lepold is a social and political philosopher whose research focuses on the politics of recognition and its ambivalences, questions of race and racism, and the contested relationship between identity and knowledge. Kristina is currently an assistant professor (“Juniorprofessorin“) in the Department of Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin. Before joining Humboldt University in 2020, she was a postdoctoral research associate at Goethe University Frankfurt. Kristina has held visiting positions at Columbia University, Harvard University, and MIT. Between 2021 and 2023, Kristina was a member of the steering committee of SWIP Germany e.V. She is affiliated with the Center for Social Critique at Humboldt University and was a member of the DFG funded research network “The Relation between Recognition Theory and Theories of Epistemic Injustice” (2021-2024).

Kristina is the author of a book on ambivalent recognition, published in German in 2021, the English translation of which is under contract with Columbia University Press. She is the co-editor of several collections, including an anthology on critical philosophy of race, published by Suhrkamp in 2021. During her fellowship at KWI, she will be working on a project on current critiques and defenses of standpoint theory in the public sphere. While some members of the public regularly deny that personal experience is a valid basis for knowledge at all, others claim that only personal experience can give someone knowledge of phenomena like racism or sexism. Kristina aims to examine the politics of knowledge behind the various arguments put forward in this debate.

Alice Morin is a postdoctoral researcher and an associate member of the Center of Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW) at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and of the Visual Studies Research Institute (VSRI) at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on fashion and “lifestyle” periodicals, the production of editorial photographs, and US-European print cultures in the 20th century, with a special interest on the transnational, transmedia circulation of photography. In 2020-2023, she was the postdoctoral research associate of the DFG-project “Fragmentwanderungen. A Media-Based Comparison of Fragment Migration” (Philipps-Universität Marburg), that examined photographic transfers between photo-magazines and photo-books, and how they have shaped photographic culture(s) in the second half of the 20th century. Her research has appeared in international journals such as the Journal of European Periodical Studies, CLIO, Fotogeschichte, the Revue Française d’Études Américaines, andPhotographica. She was also scientific advisor to French Vogue’s centennial exhibition at the Palais Galliera-Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris (2021-2022).

At the KWI, she will pursue her work on her first book-length monograph, proposing a cultural history of the “media empire” Condé Nast throughout the 20th century. The book argues for the significance of the American corporation in shaping visual and popular culture, in particular in view of its investment in photography, and in the promotion of its most famous magazine, Vogue, across media formats. She will also organize a workshop on the KWI’s annual topic, „Guilty Pleasures,“ to collectively ponder middlebrow women’s cultures and the visual attraction underlying fashion photography.

Dr. Opolot Okia is a professor of modern African History at Wright State University in the USA. His research examines forced labor in colonial East Africa and the impact of changing international discourses on acceptable labor practices. He has published several articles and two books, Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya: The Legitimization of Coercion, 1912-1930 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Labor in Colonial Kenya After the Forced Labor Convention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Dr. Okia has also served as a Fulbright scholar at Moi University in Kenya (2007-2009) and Makerere University in Uganda (2016-2017). During his sojourn at KWI, he will complete his manuscript entitled, Making Africans Work.

Karel Pletinck is a postdoctoral researcher interested in the interconnections between history, philosophy and the arts, with a focus on post-war Europe. He holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Antwerp. He is currently finishing his first monograph, tentatively titled Revelationist Aesthetics in Contemporary Cinema: History, Analysis, Criticism (1950s-2000s), which is under contract with Amsterdam University Press. He has published his work in journals such as French Forum, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, and French Screen Studies.

As a KWI International Fellow, Dr. Pletinck will develop a research proposal focusing on how left-wing writers renegotiated their political engagement in the post-war period. The project examines this renegotiation through the lens of a number of literary and cultural journals. It also takes a transnational approach, focusing on the exchanges and knowledge transfers between France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches, including periodical studies, intellectual history, and literary sociology, the project aims to examine the strategies writers employed to navigate the intersection of the literary, intellectual and political fields. As part of his residency, he is organising the workshop ‘Politics and Literature in Postwar European Journals (1945-1975)’.

Katia Schwerzmann is a philosopher and media scholar whose research explores the intersection of the body, technology, and politics, addressing current algorithmic rationality and its connection to mechanisms of enclosure, value extraction, and selective exposure to risks. After earning her PhD from a joint program between Freie Universität Berlin and Université de Lausanne, she has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania, UC Santa Cruz, Duke University, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and most recently, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. At KWI, Katia will work on a grant proposal that frames current AI as a normative endeavor that impacts subjectivity and identity formation as well as knowledge production.