Potsdam Postcolonial Chair for Global Modernities

The Department of English and American Studies hosts the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair for Global Modernities funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from 2020-2022. Internationally renowned scholars will join the Department as Guest Professors for a period of up to six months to teach and research together with their Potsdam colleagues in Literary and Cultural Studies.

The chair aspires to advance innovative teaching in our superdiverse MA Programme Anglophone Modernities in Literature and Culture. In accordance with the decidedly post-colonial orientation of the MA programme, our Guest Professors will contribute to a diversification and decanonisation of the curriculum; they will introduce new international topics and approaches to our classrooms; and they will facilitate the reflection of teachers and students on the specific locality of knowledge production. Together with Potsdam colleagues in Literary and Cultural Studies, the Guest Professors will also conduct a series of workshops that test out best practice models for teaching the global postcolonial classroom.

For more information on guest professorships, event announcements and student essays, visit our blog project Global Modernities, affiliated with the Master’s programme Anglophone Modernities in Literature and Culture and the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair of Global Modernities: https://globalmod.hypotheses.org/.

Meet Our Guest Professors 

Satish Poduval (winter term 2020/21)
Satish Poduval is Professor of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India. His research interests include film and media studies as well as critical theory, focussing on connections and differences between Western and (South) Asian approaches. 

Sarah Casteel (summer term 2021)
Sarah Casteel is Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University, Canada where she teaches postcolonial and diaspora literatures. Her research areas include Caribbean literature and hemispheric approaches to the literatures of the Americas as well as theories of diaspora and transnationalism. She is particularly interested in the emerging conversations between postcolonial and Jewish/Holocaust studies.

Katrina Schlunke (winter term 2021/22)
Katrina Schlunke is Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania and the University of Sydney, Australia. She is interested in thinking and writing about Indigenous (Australian) studies, (popular) cultural history, critical theory, ecocriticism and has an ongoing interest in fictocriticism, material fiction and queering the postcolonial.

Ira Raja (summer term 2022)
Ira Raja is Professor in the Department of English at Delhi University, India. She teaches South Asian literatures in English, as well as cultural studies and critical theory. Her research focusses on feminism and gender studies, ageing and intergenerational relationships, as well as consumption and food studies.