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.

This large-scale research program brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from five different faculties (history, literature, philosophy, law, and political sciences). With projects ranging historically from antiquity to the twenty-first century and spatially from Europe to Southern India, West Africa, and the Americas, the program's overarching aim is to uncover the dynamic force of practices of comparing for macro-scale historical transformation processes. It is hence shedding light on contexts within which comparison occurs, and on its role in processes of historical change, rather than looking at comparison as a method – a nuance that makes an important difference. In this interdisciplinary, cross-faculty research program, I am Co-PI in the project group World orders and societal futures: Racist Practices of Comparing in the Caribbean 1791-1912.

Volcanic eruptions can affect the Earth’s climate system, and climate variability occupies an uncomfortable place in historical enquiry. Even though human demography and history are closely connected with environmental conditions and change, most historians and archaeologists have been reluctant to consider climate for understanding political, economic, social and cultural transformations. Much of the scholarship addressing these complex relationships continues to be constrained by the disciplinary limits of individuals and institutions.
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
My book project's central focus is on the parallel transformation of human societies and natural environments in the Caribbean (that is, Hispaniola and Jamaica) and on the close entanglement of those two spheres through already existing (indigenous) and imported (colonial European and African) agricultural practices. Connected with this research question are three overarching aims. First, to sharpen the concept of “entanglement” beyond its metaphorical use to describe unequal relationships of power in colonial contexts. In connection with this aim, second, to systematically include climatic and environmental factors into the thinking and logic of “entanglement” and “entangled history.” The third aim is to link this expanded understanding of historical entanglements with current transformation studies, in order to show how specific such socio-environmental entanglement constellations have co-evolved over time and how their longevity and transformative power may be relevant for current questions of global change. First steps of research for this project and two workshops on the wider theme of the socio-environmental transformation of the Americas have been generously supported by the Project The Americas as a Space of Entanglement, at the Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld.


  • Historical Perspectives on Climate Change Aadaptation
This research cooperation with two colleagues, Dr. George Adamson (King's College London) and Dr. Matthew Hannaford (University of Lincoln), aims to provide new conceptual perpectives as well as case studies from historical research on adaptation to climatic changes or extreme events from three different continents, namely, Asia, Africa and North America including the (Circum-)Caribbean. The goal is to publish several co-authored articles, the first of which  appeared with Global Environmental Change in December 2017/ January 2018. We organized two workshops (see "Activities"), which were also supported by the Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld.
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