This April, we are delighted to welcome our 10th cohort of KWI International Fellows and also a new Academy in Exile Fellow. Five new researchers will join us for the next six months. To encourage collaborations between our guests and members of the UA Ruhr, we would appreciate it if you could share this press release within your networks. If you want to connect with our fellows or have any questions, please write Dr Ricarda Menn at [email protected].
Martin Babička is a historian of the late 20th century. He earned his PhD from the University of Oxford and was most recently 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.
Stefan Laffin was recently a Quidde Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome, with previous positions at the universities of Bielefeld and Hannover. His dissertation dealt with the Allied occupation of Southern Italy during WWII, and his second book explored the founding of the German Centre for Venetian Studies (DSZV). At KWI, Stefan will be researching forms of academic advancement and the international dimensions of foreign cultural politics.
Sakina Shakil Gröppmaier is a contemporary historian and transatlanticist. She earned her PhD in North American Studies from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) in 2024 as part of the Arts of Autonomy research group at LMU’s Amerika-Institut. In addition to working on her first monograph, which examines strategic uses of the digital public sphere by political movements, she will be developing her postdoctoral research project while at KWI.
Carl Fischer received his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University in 2012 and is a professor of Latin American visual culture, gender studies, and literature at Fordham University in New York. As Thyssen@KWI Fellow, he will be working on a book project which argues that the doctrine of geopolitics is key to understanding the aesthetics of authoritarianism in Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay.
Carlos Gerardo Zúñiga Nieto previously worked as a lecturer in the History Department and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University and also as a visiting assistant professor of history at Boston College. He holds a PhD in Latin American History and the Caribbean from Columbia University. As an Academy in Exile Fellow at KWI, he will be working on a book focussing on the making of the public sphere in Mexico.
Detailed information about the researchers and their research interests, pictures, and CVs can be found on the KWI homepage.
