Fellows & Projects

Olivia Glaze is a Medical Humanities scholar whose research explores how experiences of illness, trauma, and disability are narrated in contemporary Portuguese literature, film, and visual culture. While grounded in the Portuguese-speaking world, her work engages more broadly with questions of cultural resistance, intersectional health inequalities, and the legacies of war, empire, and migration. She received her PhD in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Oxford in 2022. Since then, she has held two postdoctoral positions on major AHRC-funded projects at the University of Exeter, UK, followed by a third postdoctoral position and a recent Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London. Her research has been published in journals including the Journal of Romance Studies and the Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies. Her first monograph, Women, Trauma Autofiction, and the End of the Portuguese Empire: Self-Camouflage as Survival (Palgrave Macmillan), is scheduled for publication later this year.

During her fellowship at KWI, Olivia will begin a new research project titled Disability and Difference: Relocating ‘Crip’ Identities in Twentieth-Century Portuguese-Speaking Literature and Film. The project examines representations of disability and crip identity in contemporary Portuguese, Angolan, and Mozambican literature and film, tracing transnational dialogues around disability, embodiment, and shared histories of violence. Although disabled figures recur frequently across Lusophone cultural production, sustained engagement with Disability Studies has remained limited. Disability and Difference addresses this gap by bringing Disability Studies frameworks into systematic dialogue with Lusophone literary and visual cultures. At KWI, Olivia will focus on the project’s first strand, which explores conflict and limb amputation in relation to the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974)—marking the end of Portugal’s empire in Africa—and the subsequent civil wars in Angola (1975–2002) and Mozambique (1977–1992) following independence. By foregrounding amputated bodies as sites where historical memory and socio-political realities intersect, this strand moves beyond symbolic or allegorical readings of injury. In doing so, it expands postimperial critique past a retrospective focus on empire, demonstrating how colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary cultural imaginaries, healthcare inequalities, and social attitudes toward disability.

Matthew Holmes is a historian of science and the environment. He received his PhD from the University of Leeds and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Stavanger. Matthew is the author of The Graft Hybrid: Challenging Twentieth-Century Genetics (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), and his articles on the modern history of biology and natural history have appeared in such journals as Technology and Culture, History of Science, Environment and History, and The British Journal for the History of Science.

At KWI, Matthew will work on his second book project, Avian Engineers: Animal Minds and Technology in America. Avian Engineers examines scientific debates over the intelligence of birds in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States and argues that technology played a central role in shaping contemporary beliefs about the abilities and limitations of animal minds. Avian Engineers describes how ornithologists, psychologists, and nature writers used technological analogies to explain bird behaviours like nest building, tool use, and migration. It also charts how Americans closely observed the interactions of birds with human technology, particularly in urban spaces, where the ability of wild birds to live alongside buildings and infrastructure was seen as an early sign of domestication.

Ciarán Kavanagh completed his PhD at University College Cork, Ireland, in 2019. This research forms the basis of his forthcoming book, Refiguring Reader-Response: Experience and Interpretation in Contemporary Fiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2027). He has recently finished an FWO Postdoctoral Project in Ghent University, Belgium. This 3-year research project, Science Fiction and Seriousness, takes a reader-oriented approach to how the concept of seriousness is formed and debated in SF’s discursive cultures.

His project, In Search of Awe, investigates the powerful emotion of awe in contemporary science and speculative fiction (SF). He contends that SF is uniquely designed to generate awe through its „what if…“ narratives that explore vast scales of space, time, and possibility, and further argues that awe has a critical role in shaping our cultural relationship with the future. In Awe, he argues that a new understanding of this relationship is urgent due to the context of the Anthropocene: the era of human-driven planetary change. This overwhelming environmental narrative, with its complex, interconnected crises and apocalyptic overtones, strongly affords negative awe emotions such as dread. In excess, this can demotivate and lead to cultural resignation, hindering the long-term, creative thinking needed to envision and work toward solutions.

Floramante SJ Ponce is a social anthropologist with extensive experience in development-induced displacement, actual and spiritual forms of energy, and Chinese infrastructure in Southeast Asia, particularly Laos. Most of his recent publications have focused on how a Chinese hydropower project, financed by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has created paradoxes in the lives of its displaced populations in northern Laos. He has published his work in journals such as Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale, Asian Anthropology, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Advances in Southeast Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Affairs, among others.

His book in preparation examines how a Chinese project produces subjects of Chinese development’s tripartite projections. Ponce argues that the resettled are projected forward as their lives are forecast (predictive projection) and governed and organised by the project’s vision of modernity and mobilities (disciplinary projection), but they are loaded with what the project disavows, like poverty and hunger in the relocation site (externalising projection, inspired by psychoanalytic notions of projection).

During his fellowship at KWI, Ponce will collaborate with Stefan Höhne and be part of the project Cultures of the Cryosphere: Infrastructures, Politics and Futures of Artificial Cooling. He plans to develop papers on the climate politics of artificial cooling among refrigerator users displaced by Chinese hydropower in northern Laos, as well as on the effects of air conditioners among young Laotian scammers working in compounds of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone.

Alexandria N. Ruble is an assistant professor of European history at the University of Idaho. She earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. Her first book, Entangled Emancipation: Women’s Rights in Cold War Germany, was published by University of Toronto Press in 2023. Her work has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Fulbright US Student Program, and the German Academic Exchange Service, among others.

Her project at KWI is titled Perpetual Prisoners: The Politics and Memory of Persecution in Post-Fascist Germany. This project explores how former political prisoners, specifically the victims of National Socialism, were reintegrated into and remembered in the three post-war German states (West Germany, East Germany, and reunified Germany) between 1945 and 2010. It argues that former political prisoners faced difficult reintegration processes because of the changing political and social atmospheres in a divided Germany during the Cold War. Even after the Cold War ended, former political detainees struggled to carve out space in the memory landscape of post-reunified Germany. The contested history of National Socialism’s political prisoners reflects Germany’s ongoing difficulties with coming to terms with its past and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Christoph Schaub holds a PhD in Germanic Languages from Columbia University and completed his Habilitation (postdoctoral dissertation) at the University of Vechta in 2025. He has taught German literature and cultural studies at Columbia University, Duke University, and the University of Vechta. Currently, he is also a research group member at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in the Horizon Europe project The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe and a research affiliate in the international partnership project Deindustrialization and the Politics of our Time. Located at the intersections of literary studies, cultural studies, and the social sciences, his research focuses on class and precarization, politics and literature, urban cultures, globalization and the Anthropocene, the sociology and social history of literature, and Afro-diasporic popular music. He is the author of Proletarische Welten: Internationalistische Weltliteratur in der Weimarer Republik (DeGruyter, 2019) and the forthcoming Weltentwürfe in Kurzprosa: Gegenwartsliteratur zwischen Globalisierung und Klimakrise (De Gruyter, late 2026/early 2027).

During his time at KWI, he will work on a new project titled A Prehistory of the Present: The Diversity of the Working Class and 1970s German Literature. It concentrates on the Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt (Literature of the Working World Workgroup) – an important left-wing, working-class literary group in 1970s West Germany – and the role diversity played for this group’s imagination of the working class, its thinking about literary form and genre, and its publication activities. If discourses about social and cultural diversity as well as the precarization of labour under neoliberal capitalism have become more forceful since the 1970s, the project probes the argument that in the Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt, diversity is only marginally imagined in the sense of cultural diversity. Instead, for the Werkkreis, diversity captures the different positions in the work process, which are influenced by gender, qualification, citizenship, migration history, etc., and due to which a plurality of working-class experiences and self-understandings emerge. The project contributes to a broadening of the notion of the working class and adds to a historically grounded understanding of the cultural figure of the working class that has recently experienced a renaissance in contemporary literature and literary studies.