About

Prior to joining the University of Potsdam in 2010, Anja Schwarz  taught at the University of Konstanz and the Freie Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2018 she directed the German-Australian research groups Memory and Migration (2010-2012, with ANU; DAAD-Go8), Colonial Entanglements (with UTS; DAAD-ATN), Experimental Histories (with UTS; DAAD-ATN), Waste Matters (with USydney; DAAD-Universities Australia) and German-Australian Anthropological Legacies (with FlindersU; DAAD-Universities Australia). She co-directs the provenance research project Berlin's Australian Archive and is co-spokesperson of the Research Training Group (DFG Graduiertenkolleg) minor cosmopolitanisms, a programme mainly focussing on PhD training conducted in close collaboration with partners in South Africa, India, Australia and North America. She is also a principal investigator of the Research Unit (DFG Forschergruppe) collaborations: assemblages, articulations, alliances.  From 2020-2022 she coordinated the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair for Global Modernities. In recent years, her research has focused on the figure of Tupaia, a Polynesian master navigator who sailed with Captain James Cook in the late eighteenth century, and on the colonial legacy of German natural history in Australia.

In 2015 Anja Schwarz was appointed as the German research expert to the Australia Germany Advisory Group.