Fellows & Projects

Martin Babička is a historian of the late 20^th century with a focus on neoliberalism, environmentalism, and the postsocialist transformation of East-Central Europe. He is particularly interested in the relationship between popular media, expertise, and politics. Having earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford, he is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague.

At KWI he will be working on a new project exploring esoteric culture, contestations of scientific expertise, and the politics of truth before and after the fall of state socialism.

Carl Fischer teaches courses on Latin American visual culture, gender studies, and literature in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. He is the author of Queering the Chilean Way: Cultures of Exceptionalism and Sexual Dissidence, 1965-2015 (2016; translated into Spanish as Locas excepciones: La vía chilena a la disidencia sexual, 2024) and co-editor of the volume Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World (2020). He is also co-translator of the essay collection Diamela Eltit: Essays on Chilean Literature, Politics, and Culture (2023), and co-editor of “Representaciones del caso de Colonia Dignidad en la producción cultural chilena reciente” (“Representations of the Colonia Dignidad Case in Recent Chilean Cultural Production”), a special issue in the journal Anales de Literatura Chilena (2023). His writing has also appeared in American Quarterly, Confluenze, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, Hispanic Review, and NACLA-Report on the Americas, among other academic journals.

He is currently co-editing the special issue “Authoritarian Aesthetics in South America,” forthcoming in the journal Revista Iberoamericana. This endeavor is related to a larger monograph, tentatively titled Cosmic Racisms: Authoritarianism, Aesthetics, and Geopolitics in Latin America’s Southern Cone, which argues that the doctrine of geopolitics is key to understanding the aesthetics of authoritarianism in Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. Moving past Europe-centered theories of fascist aesthetics, Cosmic Racisms examines how authoritarian thinkers imagined peripheral territories in the Southern Cone—the Falkland Islands, Patagonia, the Chaco region, the Atacama Desert, Easter Island, and Antarctica—as deserted, yet seductive, spaces into which states could expand their sovereignty. These expansionist imaginaries—imperial, but also anticolonial—involved racism, state-sponsored genocide, antisemitism, normative masculinity, and paranoid conspiracy theories. Cosmic Racisms places these discourses in tension with the recent wave of feminist and queer Latin American thinkers who have expressed their anti-authoritarian ideas in similarly geopolitical terms, invoking the concept of the cuerpo-territorio to show how environmental extractivism, femicides, genocide, forced disappearance, and other authoritarian actions are simply further instances of Latin American expansionism. The project thus links together multiple regions, examines a longue durée of authoritarianism from the late 19^th century to the present, and investigates the possibility of a Latin American-centered theory of authoritarian and anti-authoritarian aesthetics.

Sakina Shakil Gröppmaier is a contemporary historian and transatlanticist based in Munich, Germany. She earned her PhD in North American Studies from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) in 2024 as part of the Arts of Autonomy research group at LMU’s Amerika-Institut, where she taught courses on North American History, Social Theory, and Literary History. She is the co-editor of two edited collections and has had essays published in academic journals in Germany and abroad.

She is currently working on her first monograph, which examines the strategic uses of the digital public sphere by political movements. In addition to the monograph, she will be developing her postdoctoral research project while at the KWI. She is from Toronto, Canada.

Before coming to KWI, Stefan Laffin was a Quidde Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome. Previously he held positions at the universities of Bielefeld and Hannover. His dissertation dealt with the Allied occupation of Southern Italy during the Second World War, with a focus on interactions between occupying officers and civilians. His second book explored the founding history of the German Centre for Venetian Studies (DSZV). He has received various scholarships from Italy and the US for his research.

At KWI, Stefan will be working on his habilitation project, ‚Between Academic Advancement, Cultural Politics, and National Representation. German Institutes Abroad from the 19th Century to the Beginning of the 20th Century‘. This project deals with forms of academic advancement and the international dimensions of foreign cultural politics. Concretely, the focus is on German academic institutions abroad. More than the specific founding history of individual institutes, it zeroes in on the genesis of the idea to advance and represent (humanities) scholarship abroad. The project thus explores how the idea and practice of German academic politics was manifested abroad, and renegotiated again and again. Central questions include the identity of individual and institutional actors, and the different contexts of their successful lines of argument. The project further aims to contribute to the German history of scholarship and society, analysing the emergence of institutes abroad, their backgrounds, motives, and connections to the academic and political landscape.