Fellows
Prof. Dr. Anna Echterhölter
Since 2018 I have been teaching history of science at the University of Vienna. Previously I worked as an interim professor at TU and HU Berlin and held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. I am the co-editor of Science in Context.
Pacific Patterns of Justification. Demanding and Translating Rights (1884-1914)
Indigenous legal constitutions existed throughout the German colonial empire. Soon there were questionnaires and journals about legal anthropology. Its findings became a hallmark of liberal colonial policy–especially in Oceania, where colonial officials were often humanities-trained. How did these self-appointed philologists of rules translate the significance of ancestors into the legal categories of an industrialized nation? How did they account for the rights of nature, roles of women, or local schemes of resource management? Indigenous common law was easily instrumentalized by colonial bureaucrats, but also called upon to organize indigenous resistance. My project investigates legitimacy as a crucial social resource and traces the varying patterns of justification across the Pacific colonies.
Fellow, October 2024 – February 2025
Dr. Emmanuel Ngue Um
I am Associate Professor of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Yaoundé 1, Cameroon. A member of the council of the Endangered Languages Project, associate editor of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, and director of the Institute of African Digital Humanities, I advocate an African perspective in linguistic research and the use of digital technologies for revitalizing under-served African languages.
Rethinking the Perspective of African Linguistics
“Rethinking the Perspective of African Linguistics” critically examines the colonial legacy embedded in the dominant approach to African linguistics, primarily structuralism in its various forms. The project calls for a comprehensive rethinking of the historical, theoretical, and methodological frameworks of the field in order to better reflect the reality of Africa’s linguistic diversity. It argues that the colonial perspective continues to shape how African languages are understood and represented, often reducing their rich diversity to oversimplified models. This dominant view, I contend, prevents an accurate understanding of the social and cognitive value of linguistic diversity, particularly in regulating social interaction and promoting open cognition.
Fellow, October 2024 – January 2025
Prof. Dr. Christine von Oertzen
I am a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin and a professor in the Media Studies Department at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. At the MPIWG, I am a member of Department Benson, where I lead the research group “Data, Media, Mind.” At the HU, my teaching focuses on media practices.
Description, Review, Narration: Positioning At-Home Observation of Infants in Fin-de-Siècle Scientific Discourse
My project takes Milicent Shinn, a reknowned figure in the emerging field of at-home study of the early development of infants, as a case in point to explore how training in the humanities, and in particular literary training, was made fruitful in the human sciences. One of the first women to receive a degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1878, Shinn started observing her baby niece at home in the early 1890s. I examine Shinn’s method of narrating her niece’s development as an example of participant observation avant la lettre, in which literary forms of close description and critical review figured prominently.
Fellow, October 2024 – March 2025
Dr. Andreas Rötzer
Since 2004 I have been a publisher with the independent publishing house Matthes & Seitz Berlin, currently specializing in German literature and humanities and in translations mainly from French, Russian, and Chinese. Before working in publishing, I studied philosophy, economics, and cultural sciences at the universities of Passau, Munich, and Paris.
Publication Formats and Sociopolitical Intervention in Times of AI
Society has changed dramatically under the influence of digital media. These changes, initially barely noticeable and negligible, have become immensely manifest over the past five years and reached a tipping point with the popularization of AI. The associated change in reading habits impacts directly and massively on the catalogs and publishing strategies of publishers with a humanities profile. The infrastructure of knowledge has been revolutionized, especially through publicly funded open access platforms, and the altered financial basis of publishers’ business models now affects both what and how they publish. What new forms of communicating academic knowledge are possible? What is the future of academic publishing, and how will it affect the production of academic knowledge?
Fellow, November 2024 – January 2025