How does history affect the present?

 

In my research, I am interested in analyzing the historical traces of current cultural formations. My Richter-project focused on historical print culture, mostly published in 19th Century France. In these texts, zombies were not the cannibal monsters familiar from Hollywood films. Rather, these texts show how zombies have served to relate the (violent) colonial and revolutionary history of the Atlantic as a space fundamentally shaped by death – and how these histories of death still permeate our present.
 

I am convinced that getting to know histories from the past – also from apparently remote places – and a critical analysis of how past and present, global North and global South have been and can be related to each other helps us to gain new perspectives on our present. The aim of this, too, is to challenge narratives that remain confined by national frames of reference, and to contribute to a more nuanced view on global entanglements.
 
In academia, there is still a long way to go to gender (and often also other forms of) equality and decent working conditions for non-tenured faculty. This is why the work of the ERN and other organizations such as the “Network for Decent Labour in Academia” in Germany (https://mittelbau.net) is so important. And it is good to see how many we are.