Apocalyptic Intoxication
Thao Ho and Maithu Bùi
In this presentation, we revisit apocalypse not as an isolated endpoint, but as an ongoing (affective) condition that shapes life realities and ecosystems through cycles of destruction, waiting, and adaptation. Apocalypse, mediated through technologies, often appears as hyperreal spectacle, producing urgency, inevitability, and a perpetual suspense toward an illusive end (Baudrillard). In contrast, diasporic experiences frequently reframe the apocalypse as lived, cyclical, and materially inscribed, resisting closures imposed by imperial narratives. Rather than offering escape, diasporic engagement provides a counter-discursive mode of enduring (or living through) the end, grounded in memory, speculation, and return.
Drawing on archives of Vietnamese diasporic histories and theoretical frameworks such as imperial ruination (Stoler), mundane militarism (Xiang), and the refugee condition (Nguyen), we will have a conversation on Maithu Bui’s video installation Mathuật – MMRBX (2022). Our discussion will engage themes of endurance, containment, and the possibility of return. We are guided by the following questions: What are the aesthetics of endurance? How do technologies of apocalypse move across scales of personal, communal, and planetary crisis? In what ways do affective and material dimensions of diasporic memory resist imperial narratives of closure? Finally, what does it mean to write with an artwork rather than about it, or: what forms of artistic and scholarly co-thinking are possible, one that is rooted in proximity, and shared risk?
Maithu Bùi (*1991) is an artist. They studied Philosophy of Language and Logic at LMU Munich, Fine Arts at UdK Berlin. Their work has been shown at the 12th Berlin Biennale, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Kunsthalle Bratislava. They are co-founder of the research collective “Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC)” and the working group “art+computation” at Gesellschaft für Informatik. Maithu Bùi is a 2024 Human Machine fellow at Akademie der Künste, a Dreaming Beyond AI fellow 2025 and a Stiftung Kunstfond fellow 2026. Their upcoming work Operation Remediation will be shown at E-WERK Luckenwalde in cooperation with Akademie der Künste Berlin.
Thao Ho is a PhD candidate in the ERC Consolidator Grant project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Within this framework, she works on the project “Last Night I Dreamed of the Sun” which explores the entanglements of memory politics, activism, and aesthetics of refusal in transnational Vietnamese cultural production within broader imperial histories. Her research interests include intercoloniality, war memory, diaspora and refugee studies, and queer and trans epistemologies. She is co-curator of the exhibition Young Birds from Strange Mountains (2024-2025) at Schwules Museum Berlin and runs a monthly show at THF Radio.
How to be (Un)known: Abstraction and Encryption in the Black British Diaspora
Fenja Akinde-Hummel and Otis Mensah
In this conversation, we discuss forms of abstraction and encryption in textual, visual and aural form in order to examine how these creative strategies facilitate a kind of provisional meaning making and preservation of the self and the group; we examine these practices as simultaneous gestures of un/intelligibility. In this talk, Fenja will explore how abstract and encrypted meaning becomes visible (but not always legible) and crucially, available for affective interpolation in meme form as a way of creating a kind of in-group identification, whilst forms of abstraction and distortion can offer ways of retaining a kind of totality of self. We ask whether kinds of individual fragmentation offer opportunities for a continued identification within specific diasporic communities. Otis Mensah will also perform their piece, “The Drawn of Us”[…]. Both Otis and Fenja will then discuss their various approaches to abstraction and encryption, as provisional methods of self-expression and self-preservation whilst engaging with the “containiality” of abstraction.
Otis Mensah is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator exploring the aesthetic fabric of language and cadence to evoke ethereal portraits of the body, family and notions of home. Drawing from a rich lineage of Black musicality, Otis’ poetic-sonic practice pulls multidimensional sound and text from archival material and reflections on dreaming and nature.
Concerned with an Abstractionist approach to language, Otis’ practice draws vitally from the likes of Norman Lewis and Jack Whitten, examining vivid experimentation with the materiality of paint as technique and lens for approaching text. Otis’ writing exalts the materiality of words to reveal a larger emotional landscape. By queering and subverting biblical language and parable, Otis exercises magical realism in their work, muddying the waters of memory and archival material with myth and portrayals of a Black diaspora.
Following their tenure as the first Poet Laureate of Sheffield, UK, Otis has had a diverse calibre of experience in contemporary art both as artist and curator; publishing their poetry collection Safe Metamorphosis with Prototype London, debuting at Glastonbury Music Festival and performing alongside Moor Mother, Benjamin Zephaniah and Little Simz.
Fenja Akinde-Hummel is a PhD candidate in the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her project, titled Black Diasporic Temporalities (of the City), seeks to examine Black diasporic experiences and artistic reproductions of time as they cluster around the metropolitan centres of London and Berlin. This work is derived from the question: How much time does it take to be Black in an environment characterised by imperialism and its racist continuities?
As an early member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, she began to catalogue the hours spent engaging with issues of racism as they arose, or rather, sustained themselves within academic spaces, before giving up (in horror). As a part of the group, Fenja has both participated in the facilitation of, and drawn support from the community cultivated by the Union.
(Research) interests include, postcolonialism, queer theory, the intersections of race and sexuality, memes and their afterlives, reality T.V. and other types of surveillance, and diverse strategies of Black survival and resistance as they relate to the above.
The Archive’s Hold: On Memories and Movies
Lan P. Duong
1975 marks the momentous end of the Vietnam War—when the U.S. military formally withdraws its troops and North Việt Nam begins to occupy its southern counterpart. Both events are memorialized in American visual memory, in which images of U.S. helicopters leaving scores of desperate people behind and a tank bulldozing through National Unification Palace in Sài Gòn are iconic mnemonics of the war and its close. In other words, much of our understanding of “Vietnam,” my own included, has been narrated through visuality and spectacle. In 2025, the war’s dénouement marks its 50th year anniversary. Narratives of loss and glory authored by the U.S. and Việt Nam continue to efface the memories of many others still grappling with the effects of the U.S.’ wars in Southeast Asia. These erasures and the structures of power that maintain them are the main axes upon which my book on film and the archive is based. Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory offers a retelling of these erasures, one that sutures my experiences of being in the film archive with close readings of a century’s worth of films. Using Critical Refugee Studies methodologies, I unpack what it means to be in the archive as a refugee scholar and writer.
Lan P. Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, coeditor of Troubling Borders: Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, and cowriter of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies. Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines 60 years of Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic film history across several institutional and community-oriented archival sites. Her book of poems, Nothing Follows, was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2023. She is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (www.criticalrefugeestudies.com) and coeditor of the UC Press book series, Critical Refugee Studies.
Playing in the Dark, Queerly: Nighttime and Queer Diasporic Meaning-Making
Anne Potjans
In her poetry volume Mucus in my Pineal Gland (2017), U.S. American artist, writer, performer and DJ Juliana Huxtable writes in one of her vignettes: “I’VE BEEN AN INSOMNIAC FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER. FROM THE MOMENT I BROKE AWAY FROM THE PARENT REGIMENTED NIGHT-SLEEP/AFTERNOON-NAP ROUTINE, I DISCOVERED THE NIGHT AS A PLACE OF REMOVE A CLEAR ESCAPE FROM THE ANXIETIES OF DEALING WITH THE DAY (“Real Doll,” 33). Printed in blueish-purple all-caps like most of her semi-autobiographical writing in this volume, Huxtable describes the ways in which for “SOMEONE LIKE ME,” a queer Black subject, breaking away from the pressures of daytime was not only a choice but a survival-ensuring necessity – the time and space to create what had to be hidden and sublimated during the day.
Drawing on Huxtable’s poetry volume, in my talk I will dig into the contrast between the diurnal and the nocturnal as a productive spatio-temporal context for queer diasporic meaning-making. Serving as a metaphor for obscurity, veiling, and secret or hidden knowledge, I argue that nighttime, in contrast to the capitalist expectations and heteropatriarchal surveillance that come with daytime, provides the conditions for a playing out of different non-conforming modes of self-expression and self-fashioning. At night the playful and the whimsical to emerge: fleeting, spontaneous and provisional forms of encounter, contact, and world-making become possible, that – though not without danger – offer possibilities for escaping, transforming and re-casting the everydayness of queer /diasporic life and its challenges. In this context, insomnia is not only an enabling factor but also functions as metaphor for and intervention into the straightness of daytime-nighttime routines.
Anne Potjans is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Consolidator grant project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. There, she has taught in the American Studies program since 2015 and currently works on a project tentatively titled “Night Shift – Queer Subcultural Spaces and the Black Diasporic Experience.” In this project, she looks at queer black writing and art in Germany between the 1960s and early 1980s to trace the intersections of race and queerness prior to the beginning of the younger Black German movement in the mid-1980s. Earlier in 2022, she completed her dissertation, which was published as Why Are You So Angry? Anger and Rage in Black Feminist Literature by Peter Lang in May 2024. She is a joint winner of Peter Lang’s Emerging Scholars Competition “New Perspectives in Black Studies.”
Queer Diaspora, Anti-Imperialism, and the City of the Future in 1980s West Berlin
Soheil Asefi
This contribution begins with Pasolini’s The Hawks and the Sparrows as a framework to examine the intersections of queer diaspora, anti-imperialism, and revolutionary struggles in 1980s West Berlin. It situates the lived experiences of queer diasporas within the historical context of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the first Christopher Street Day (CSD) in West Berlin, and the broader Cold War dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution in a divided city.
Drawing on oral history methodology and extensive archival work, this analysis engages with voices of queer diasporas in Berlin who navigated complex political and ideological transitions and asserted their agency in their accounts of a lived experience of diasporic provision—where temporary belonging creates distinct forms of care, intimacy, and return. These temporary intimacies and provisional returns reflect capitalism’s contradictions, through which both the desire for stability and the possibility of return are perpetually deferred.
Set against the backdrop of the German student movement of the 1970s and the anti-imperialist struggles of the Iranian diaspora, Asefi traces the upheavals that culminated in the 1979 moment and the counterrevolutions of the 1980s—from Iran to Turkey and across the Global South. It critically examines how these interconnected histories illuminate questions of agency, belonging/un-belonging in queer terms, moving beyond identity politics to engage with the disruptions of power and capital.
In the context of homonationalism and homocapitalism, the contribution critiques the commodification of historical trauma within Western human rights discourse, as well as the appropriation of returnee “cultural capital” by the “home” country. These narratives, captured through oral histories and archival fragments, highlight the tensions between resistance and co-optation, and reflect the deferred possibilities of revolutionary futures within the ever-shifting landscapes of queer diasporic life.
Soheil Asefi is an exiled journalist and Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Following temporary release on bail in Tehran and a ban on further education and employment, he was designated “writer in exile” by the German PEN Center. Asefi completed his master’s degree in political science at the New School for Social Research (NSSR). Currently, he teaches Contemporary European History from the Global South Perspective at Lehman College. He explores queer anti-imperialist diaspora solidarity with the Global South/the Third World in Berlin and New York City spanning 1970 to 1999, forming the heart of his dissertation on queer diaspora, transnational, oral, and urban history.
Telling Stories of Diasporic Identities in Contemporary Germany: Identitti on Page and Stage
Leila Essa
examines elements of shared authorship in Mithu Sanyal’s 2021 novel Identitti and Simone Dede Ayivi’s 2023 stage adaptation IdentittiRezeptionista, building on research interviews with both the novelist and the director and analysing the meta-commentary that Ayivi’s work offers. The paper explores the transmission of academic discourses on race and postcolonial approaches and characters’/actors’ personal responses to these, i.e. the representation of self-theorisation, and resulting reception patterns. It discusses Identitti’s emphasis on “big names” of postcolonial theory as opposed to mention of (Germany-specific) postmigrant approaches in the novel/play, taking into account Sanyal’s and Ayivi’s own comments as well as recent scholarly discussions on the productivity of “postmigration” as a concept (Oholi, El Hissy, Cha and Aras 2022). In this context, it also accounts for the shift towards storytelling of anticolonial resistance in Sanyal’s 2024 novel Antichristie and the parallel shift in reception towards a criticism of the didactic mode that marks both novels. The contribution thinks through the tension between destabilised authorship / knowledge hierarchies and the didactic mode.
Leila Essa is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, where she currently leads a Dutch Research Council project on authorial strategies against exclusionary discourses in Germany and Britain. Leila regularly writes and talks about literature and its politics on public platforms, e.g. for Zeit Online, Berlin Review or the Goethe Institute. She is one of the authors of the anthology andersbleiben and, as of 2023, a judge for the Kurt-Tucholsky-Preis for politically engaged writing in German. Her academic work has appeared in journals like Comparative Literature Studies and the book project building on her PhD thesis ‘Partitioned Nations, Shared Narratives: Contemporary Novels on India and Germany’ won the Women in German Studies Book Prize 2021.
From The Dream Archive
Tarek Shukrallah, Todd & Zoya and Thao Ho
“Home is the stuff of dreams. But how do we dream of home without idealising it?”
This session explores dreaming as a form of archiving and home-making, where the act of dreaming, whether asleep or awake, becomes a method for unworlding, remembering, and imagining otherwise. Framed by Todd and Zoya’s reflection that “archiving and dreaming [can be] hom(e-)ing,” this session invites a collective inquiry into dreaming as a shared and active process of house- and home-building, material, emotional, and imaginative. Bringing together fragments from our own engagements with dreams, we ask: how do dreams provision us? What does it mean to rest when home is unstable? Can dreaming be a form of resistance, of imagining home differently?
The session also includes an open discussion with the participants, and a 20-minute nap. Participants are invited to begin or revisit dream journaling as a form of self-archiving and reflection before and during the conference.
Tarek Shukrallah (they/them) is a political and social scientist with a focus on global gender and queer studies, intersectionality and social movement studies. They engage in participatory qualitative research and engages as a community organizer. In 2024, Tarek published Nicht die Ersten. Bewegungsgeschichten von Queers of Color in Deutschland.
Zoya is a curator, translator, educator and organizer based in Berlin. Todd is a freelance curator, and anthropologist based in Zurich and Berlin. As the collective Utopia/Dystopia, Zoya and Todd have curated a series of events in critical dialogue with the Queerness in Photography (2022-2023) exhibition that took place in C/O Berlin, and they curated the exhibition _Gap: Having Time. Counting Time. Filling Time. (2023) at the Schwules Museum in Berlin about the aesthetics and politics of having time.
Everyday Translations: Queer Diasporic Writing After Return
Lee Langvad
Relying on translation in the most mundane situations is a particular, but not unique, condition for Korean adoptees once they are reunited with their families. Not speaking the same language as one’s parents is an experience they share with many diasporic subjects. In Lee Langvad’s autofictional novel Tolk (My Interpreter, 2024), the protagonist travels with an interpreter from Denmark to South Korea to meet her parents, sisters, nieces and nephews for dinner. Tolk conveys the many layers of silences, misunderstandings and desires in the family’s communication in a minimalist yet intimate manner. The novel’s formal elements in particular – repetition and visual blank spaces – convey feelings of distance while sitting at a table across from each other, but also the patience, care and love of all involved.
In this panel, Lee Langvad will read from her novel in Danish and English. In the conversation that follows, we will talk about the limitations and the potential of translation for building ordinary diasporic relationships, the autobiographical in relation to the fictional, and the need for formal experiments in queer diasporic writing.
Lee Langvad (b. 1980, Seoul) is a writer and translator who lives in Copenhagen. She is the author of several books including Find Holger Danske (Find Holger Dane) and HUN ER VRED – Et vidnesbyrd om transnational adoption (SHE IS ANGRY – A testimony of transnational adoption). Her latest book TOLK (My Interpreter) is a novel about love, family, language barriers and queerness. Langvad has received many awards for her work such as the Montana’s Literature Prize. She has translated works by Kim Hyesoon, Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas and Max Frisch. Also, she has collaborated with a long list of artists in video art, performance, theatre, film, music and sound art in Denmark, Sweden, and South Korea. https://www.leelangvad.dk/
For Now, Always: Temporal Feelings of a Dashed Ordinary
Rhaisa Williams
This talk explores the emotional, intellectual, and temporal landscapes of being Black, marginalized, and poor in a U.S. city viewed as empty and dying, focusing on how these experiences shape relationships with the present and future. Drawing from personal family archives, Black Feminist thought, and Performance Studies, it examines the “middle” as a critical site of experience—where the mundane and extraordinary converge to produce nuanced understandings of resilience, weariness, and temporality. The concept of “resilient weariness” is introduced to articulate the paradoxical strength and fatigue that emerge from enduring systemic precarity while navigating everyday life.
Rhaisa Kameela Williams is Assistant Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Williams’ research uses mixed-archive methods—spanning across literature, family history, archives, and public policy—to focus on the intersections of blackness, motherhood, affect, and disquieting modes of freedom. Her manuscript, Mama, Don’t You Weep: Black Motherhood, Performance, and the Costs of Grief (forthcoming with NYU Press), traces the intimate relationship between grief and black motherhood from the civil rights movement to the present. Offering discontinuous readings of grief, the book asserts that Black women, no matter their personal relationship to offspring or othermothering, have specifically mobilized grief inherent to Black motherhood as a tactic to perform, remake, and critique forms of citizenship. In 2020, she co-edited a special journal issue with Stacie McCormick on Toni Morrison’s influence on performance studies and adaptation, published through College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies. Williams earned her Ph.D and M.A. in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been supported by the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and the Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, and Ford foundations. She has published or forthcoming book chapters in Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (eds. Zoraida Lopez-Diagoand Lesly Canossi), Literature in Context: Toni Morrison (ed. Stephanie Li), and Thinking from Black (eds. Dionne Brand, Tina Campt, and Christina Sharpe). Williams’ peer-reviewed articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Theatre Journal, College Literature, Transforming Anthropology, Callaloo, and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly.
Substitute Histories
Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen
A provisional practice: make do with what is available in the current environment and substitute what is not with something else. Out of necessity, to approximate a craving, most obvious in cooking. Does this also work for historiography? If a past is not available through narrative or memory, can it be replaced with others’ stories? In the West German archives of Korean adoptions, past events are inaccessible. Surprisingly, instead, there is mentioning of Vietnamese children and the Vietnam War, of work migration and the children of so-called guestworkers. Reading the novel Das achte Kind by Alem Grabovac, about young migrant women working in German factories, the story converges with that of Korean women. What happens when one substitutes images and stories from different contexts? What is lost, what is gained?
Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and at the Braunschweig University of Art. Her research focuses on migrant and diasporic writing and art, queer and postcolonial archives, and reparative practices after Eve Sedgwick. She is currently working on a creative nonfiction and archive based manuscript about adoptions from Korea in West Germany from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Provisional Arrivals: Repetition and (Imaginary) Returns
Elahe Haschemi Yekani
In this presentation, I turn to an eclectic collection of images, narratives and films by artists like Reza Abdoh and Sohrab Shahid Saless, depicting migrant practices of building routines and make-shift forms of belonging in nation states whose rules they often did not fully grasp and yet built life worlds in. Despite the current unbearable and relentless rise in anti-migrant hostility, looking back at the 1970s and 1980s provides an archival and affective anchor in light of the insecurities in the now and an acknowledgment of the negative feelings of unbelonging. I want to suggest that the provisional can be understood as a queer temporal logic that intervenes into a more linear timeline of arrival and generational frameworks of migration. The provisional also shapes queer modes of relationality that refuse forms of assimilation as the ultimate “arrival” of migrants.
Elahe Haschemi Yekani is Professor of English and American Literature and Culture with a Focus on Postcolonial Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Haschemi Yekani is the recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives”, in which she investigates queer narratives of migration with a comparative focus on Germany, Britain, and the US in a new book project tentatively called Mini City. Her research interests include diasporic writing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, masculinity studies, queer theory and intersectionality.
In addition to numerous articles and two monographs, Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel (Palgrave Macmillan 2021, open access, shortlisted for the Esse Book Award 2022: Literatures in the English language) and The Privilege of Crisis. Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature,Photography and Film (Campus 2011, won the Britcult Award 2009), Haschemi Yekani has published a third book on Revisualising Intersectionality (Palgrave Macmillan 2022, open access) co-written with Magdalena Nowicka and Tiara Roxanne.
After Hours
Tijana Ristic Kern, Jeannette Oholi, Anne Potjans, Aisha Said and Jasper J. Verlinden
The idea of this panel came out of how and where we, the participants, met: in the off spaces, the odd-hours, the alternative knowledge-producing spaces, in emails, and on Zoom. Is this just about a few colleagues getting a drink together from time to time, or is it diasporic scholars reaching out to one another, networking and meeting sporadically at events? Or is it actually something more than that? Is this where diasporic academic subjects get real about what it means to not fit in properly, neither here nor there? Is this where diasporic meaning making happens at its finest and is most productive?
By being here, by moving within academic spaces, we essentially trouble the notion of Western academic knowledge as only ever heteropatriarchal and white. To be sure, white dominance and violence is something that, now more than ever, we contend with everyday. Its violence is all encompassing, ordinary. Its exclusionary mechanisms are palpable at every turn. White heteropatriarchal structures are what surrounds queer of color diasporic scholarly life. In this panel, however, we do not want it to take center stage. This panel is about us.
Western academic spaces, despite their limitations and cis-heteropatriarchal and racist origins seem to have a lure for queer and/or diasporic subjects, which might suggest that, to a certain extent, there is a possibility for us to still find spaces and discourses where we feel a sense of belonging. Is it because in these spaces our experiences can mean something more than just one person’s life story? Academia provides the possibility to, together with others, harness our experiences’ epistemological potential. Scholars of Women of Color Feminism, Third World Feminist, Queer of Color and Postcolonial Critique have guided us in this endeavor. And yet, while some parts of us are ‘at home’ and may feel a sense of belonging in Western academic spaces – as conditional as it may be – we would like to take a closer look at academia as our “official” container and ask the question: What are the parts of us that academia contains, and what is it that spills over? What is it that cannot be held? And further, how and where does this “it” (we suspect it is something affective) go? And will it ever find a place to just “be”?
Tijana Ristic Kern is a PhD student and a Research Associate at the Department of English and American Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She completed an MA degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Belgrade and an MA in English Literatures at HU Berlin. Her thesis Writing the Queer Self: Life-Writing Between Modernism and Postmodernism looks at the interactions of queer life writing, fiction, and theoretical writing in the 20th century.
She received funding from the international program of the European University Alliance Circle U. for a research-focused course “Life Writing as a Democratizing Practice: Hybrid Feminist and Queer Writing 1960-1990” (2022) and for an international interdisciplinary ECR workshop “Artistic Practices as Political or Activist Interventions” (2023). She teaches courses in cultural studies, feminist and queer theories, postmodernist writing, modernist writing, and hybrid life writing as an activist genre.
She is part of the Polish-German Weave LAP project Queer Theory in Transit: Reception, Translation, and Production of Queer Theory in Polish and German Contexts (QUEERIT), funded by DFG and NCN (2023-2026), as well as a member of an international research group on Queer Theory and Literary Studies. She is co-editor of Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class: Class Notes and Queer-ies, a volume published by the research group Queer Theory and Literary Studies with Routledge in 2024 (available in Open Access).
Jeannette Oholi holds a PhD in comparative literature and published her first monograph “Afropäische Ästhetiken” (Afropean Aesthetics) in 2024. After completing her PhD, she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College for two years and has just returned to Germany. Her research interests include German-language literature of the 20th and 21st century with a special emphasis on minoritized writers, migration, empowerment, resistance and memory. Jeannette is currently working on her second book project, which focuses on autobiographical writing.
Aisha Said is a PhD candidate and research associate in the Department of English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she teaches courses on Arab American literature, cultural studies, and the history of American literature. Her dissertation examines Arab American narratives of transnational belonging, diaspora, and migration, with a particular focus on literature produced in the post-9/11 era. Her research explores how selected Arab American literary texts contribute to the development of decolonial epistemologies. She is particularly interested in contextualizing the history and racialization of Arab Americans in order to critically engage with Arab American Studies and its place within the broader field of American Studies. Aisha was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Syracuse University and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the American University in Cairo.
Jasper J. Verlinden (he/they) is a postdoctoral lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies with emphasis on Postcolonial Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He has recently completed his dissertation project which reads late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnic minority literatures from the U.S. in relation to bureaucratic and administrative archives and practices. Within this project, his interest lay in ascertaining if and how racialized minority authors engaged with and responded to such administrative practices and the restrictive demarcating lines of population management. He has published on trans studies, affect and disability, and legal personhood in the context of border crossings. His postdoc project is on contemporary trans poetry.
Roundtable Discussion with “Outside Eyes”
Feng-Mei Heberer teaches cinema studies at New York University. She is the author of Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism. As a film programmer, she has most recently collaborated with Saigon Experimental and the Taiwan Women’s Film Association.
Carlos Kong is a joint-PhD candidate in Art History at Princeton University and in Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, where he is completing his dissertation Migrant-Situated Knowledge in the Arts of Postmigration: Turkish German Archives in Contemporary Art and Film. He is currently a fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on postmigrant cultural practices, queer and diasporic archives, and transnational approaches across contemporary art, film, literature, and migration. Recent publications include “Migration from Turkey in German Cinema” in Destination: Tashkent. Experiences of Cinematic Internationalism (2024), and “Poetic Afterlives in the Archive of Migration” in Kleine Formen – widerständige Formen? Postmigration Intermedial (2023). He recently curated the film series Transnational Filmmaking in Germany: Routes, Practices, Archives at Sinema Transtopia.
Christine Okoth is Lecturer in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic in the Department of English at King’s College London. Her work is primarily concerned with questions of environment and race in contemporary Black literature and visual art. She’s currently writing a book entitled Race and the Raw Material and her writing has been published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, Cambridge Quarterly, and Textual Practice.
