Cohort 1

Dr Ryan Nutting possesses over fifteen years of experience working in universities and heritage organizations in the United Kingdom and United States. Ryan received his PhD from the School of Museum Studies and Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Museum Studies. Ryan’s work focuses on the history, collecting, display, and interpretation of objects to convey information and construct knowledge on places, cultures, and peoples in museums. In addition to two published articles, Ryan currently has three book chapters and two articles in press with publishers including  Sorbonne Université Presses, the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport, and the University of Leicester.

During his International Fellowship at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Institut Essen (KWI) Ryan conducted research on the changing interpretation of four netsuke held by the Museum Folkwang from 2010 to the present. Ryan recently submitted an article based on this research for publication to an academic journal. While at the KWI Ryan also conducted an interview on his work and museum decolonization with the Academy in Exile titled “Colonial Collecting and Representation” which is available here.

Carla Rodrigues Almeida is a Brazilian interdisciplinary researcher with a Master’s degree in Mathematics, a Ph.D. in Physics, and Post-doctoral training in History of Science. Her research interests are the History of 20th-Century Physics, Quantum Cosmology, and Science Communication. But Carla is always eager to learn and explore other disciplines and themes. During her time at KWI, she investigated the history of the theoretical discovery of black holes. More specifically, the development of the thermodynamic theory for black holes.

As an International Fellow at KWI, Carla published a paper in Portuguese about the hundred-year history of the discovery of black holes. It was a science communication article aimed at an audience of young Brazilian physics undergraduates. She also organized and hosted the conference “Astrocientistas,” in homage to Brazilian female astrophysicists and cosmologists.

Danilo Scholz is a historian of ideas who specialises in the history of European political thought in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

After earning a BA in History at the University of Cambridge, he relocated to Paris where he obtained the diploma of the École normale supérieure in History and Philosophy. His masters’ thesis, which he completed at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), analysed the influence of interwar German philosophy on the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève and won both the Raymond Aron and the Marc Bloch Prize. His doctoral dissertation in History, also completed at the EHESS in Paris, investigated concepts and critiques of the state in French political thought since 1945. Before coming to the KWI, Danilo has been a postdoctoral researcher at the European University Institute in Florence and at Columbia University in New York. He also has written for cultural reviews such as Merkur or broadsheets including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2019, the German Academy of the Arts has awarded him the Heinrich Mann Prize for non-fiction writing.

Danilo is currently finishing an intellectual biography of Alexandre Kojève, which is under contract with C. H. Beck. During his time as Thyssen@KWI-Fellow, he laid the foundations for his now project entitled “The Promise of Technocracy, 1914-1968”. According to a widely held view, bureaucratic organisations and technocratic forms of governance constitute at best a necessary evil, at worst a threat to democracy and freedom. Eschewing such summary verdicts, the project strives to recover the emancipatory potential that politicians, academics and intellectuals in France, Germany and Great Britain attributed to expertise and the rule of experts. It will pay particular attention to technocratic visions in the realms of politics, economics and international relations.