Funded Projects
The Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CALAS) is a university-based Center for Advanced Studies founded by a consortium of Latin American and German universities. The University of Guadalajara, Mexico, houses the head office of CALAS while three regional offices are located at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador; the Universidad de Costa Rica in San José, Costa Rica; and the Universidad Nacional San Martín in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The German Universities Bielefeld, Kassel, Hanover and Jena are responsible for the project management. In addition, numerous other universities and research facilities from all over Latin America are associated with CALAS.
Together with Bielefeld colleague and CALAS directors Dr. Olaf Kaltmeier and Dr. Gerardo Cham, as well as with Dra. Susana Herera Lima (ITESO) I will coordinate the research group Coping with Environmental Crises, which is scheduled to start working at the center in 2022. The main intellectual product to come out of the research group's work is a six-volume hand book about the Latin American perspective on the Anthropocene.
- Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1288 Practices of Comparing (funded by the German Research Council)
- Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld (ZiF) Cooperation Group Volcanoes, Climate and History (VCH), Nov 2021-Oct 2023
VCH will engage with the interface of climate and history in a new way, beginning with the premise that exchange and dialogue across disciplinary and epistemological divides should be habitual practice. Five one-week meetings of the seven Core Group Fellows, together with an additional six scholars per meeting, will allow us to disentangle the possible climatic and environmental responses and societal consequences of volcanic eruptions. Our hypothesis-driven meetings will prioritise those challenges that constitute present frontiers of knowledge in any given field.
Other Research Projects
- Book Project: Encountering the Tropics and Transforming Unfamiliar Environments in the Caribbean, 1492 to 1804
- Historical Perspectives on Climate Change Aadaptation