We are delighted to welcome our 9th cohort of KWI International Fellows this October! Eight new researchers will join us for the next six months. Find their research topics here:
Alice Morin is a postdoctoral researcher and associate member of the Center of Research on the English-Speaking World at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and the Visual Studies Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on fashion and “lifestyle” periodicals, the production of editorial photographs, and US-European print cultures. At KWI, she will work on her first monograph, proposing a cultural history of the “media empire” Condé Nast throughout the 20th century.
Ádám Havas is a sociologist whose interests lie at the intersection of cultural sociology, postcolonial studies, and popular music studies. He most recently held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship at the University of Barcelona, Department of Sociology, with a project comparing improvised music scenes in Spain, the UK, and Hungary. At KWI, Ádám will be developing a research grant proposal focussing on a comparative empirical study about music and migration in Afro-Latin Iberia and the Balkans.
Kristina Lepold is a social and political philosopher whose research focuses on the politics of recognition and its ambivalence, questions of race and racism, and the contested relationship between identity and knowledge. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin. At KWI, she will be working on a project on current critiques and defences of standpoint theory in the public sphere, examining the politics of knowledge involved.
Spiros Chairetis 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. He earned his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2021, and he is currently a fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities in Athens. At KWI, he will work on an edited volume provisionally titled Humor and Its Political Affordances: From Nostalgia to Cancel Cultures, exploring understandings of humour from Europe and other parts of the world.
Karel Pletinck is a postdoctoral researcher interested in the interconnections between history, philosophy, and the arts, focusing on post-war Europe. He holds a PhD in literary studies from the University of Antwerp. At KWI, he will develop a research proposal focussing on how left-wing writers renegotiated their political engagement in the post-war period, examining the strategies employed to navigate the intersection of the literary, intellectual, and political fields.
Opolot Okia is a professor of modern African History at Wright State University in the USA. His research examines forced labour in colonial East Africa and the impact of changing international discourses on acceptable labour practices. He has also served as a Fulbright Scholar at Moi University in Kenya and Makerere University in Uganda. At KWI, he will complete his manuscript, entitled Making Africans Work: Forced Labor in Colonial Africa, 1885–1961.
Veronica Ferreri is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo. She earned her PhD in 2018 from SOAS, University of London. Part of her research explores Syrian displacement into Lebanon, while another strand deals with paperwork and bureaucracy. At KWI, Veronica will work on her first monograph, entitled The Aftermath of War: Survival and Displacement across the Syrian-Lebanese Border.
Katia Schwerzmann is a philosopher and media scholar whose research explores the intersection of the body, technology, and politics. She earned her PhD from a joint programme between the Freie Universität Berlin and University of Lausanne, and she most recently held a postdoctoral position at Ruhr University Bochum. At KWI, Katia will work on a grant proposal framing current AI as a normative endeavour that impacts subjectivity, identity formation, and knowledge production.
More details about our fellows and their projects can be found here. If you are interested in connecting with our fellows or have any questions, feel free to write Dr Ricarda Menn at ricarda.menn@kwi-nrw.de.
