Weiao Xing is a cultural and literary historian of the early modern Atlantic world, focusing on English-Indigenous and French-Indigenous encounters from the late 16th to the early 18th centuries. He earned his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2023 and was previously trained in translation studies, historical sociolinguistics, and liberal arts. For his doctoral research, Weiao Xing integrated digitised primary sources with rare books and manuscripts consulted in the UK, France, Canada, and the US. In 2023, Weiao Xing undertook short-term visiting fellowships at the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies, the Huntington Library, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Currently, Weiao Xing is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Modern History, University of Tübingen, hosted by Professor Renate Dürr. His ongoing project builds upon his thesis research on languages, translation, and encounters in the 17th-century North Atlantic world, aiming at producing a monograph that illustrates language learning and translingual knowledge production. Meanwhile, he is delving into the history of books and print culture, seeking to comprehend the early modern reception of the French Jesuit Relations and the translation of books on the Americas in Europe. As a historian with strong interdisciplinary interests, Weiao Xing has explored themes including language education in 17th-century Massachusetts, historical narratives in early 18th-century New England, and the dramas and historical accounts in 17th-century Québec. Beyond his academic engagement, Weiao Xing is a practitioner of public history. He has served as an editor for ‘Doing History in Public’, a blog series run by postgraduate historians at the University of Cambridge and has contributed posts to various platforms.

Duration of Stay: January 2024 – January 2025

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Flavia Guerra Cavalcanti holds a PhD in International Relations from the Institute of International Relations (IRI) of PUC-Rio in Brazil. Her Ph.D. thesis dealt with the strategic relationship between the European Union and Latin America from a poststructuralist and postcolonialist perspective, specifically focusing on how European identity was - and continues to be -  constructed through discourses about the Latin American Other. Since 2010, she has been a full-time professor in the International Relations course at the Institute of International Relations and Defense (IRID) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Her research interest profoundly connects to the disciplines she teaches, such as International Political Sociology, Postcolonialism Studies, Critical Border Studies, and Critical Security Studies. As a postdoctoral Global Encounters fellow at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen, she is working on the project "Oceanic Thinking in Migrant Resistance: How the Concept of Wet Ontology Can Destabilize the Fixed Conceptions of Territory and Belonging." At the first moment, the research aims to investigate how Oceanic Thinking or Ocean Studies, particularly the concept of "wet ontology," coined by Philip Steinberg (2010), can destabilize conceptions about territory, sovereignty, citizenship, and belonging that emerge from a supposed binarism between Land and Sea embedded in the discipline of IR. As Rob Walker puts it (1993), the individual depends on his attachment to an inside (a territorial space) to be eligible for citizenship and human rights, whereas others are not. Our modern idea of the Subject, the Sovereign and the Citizen, comes from a territorial and exclusionary logic based on the binarism between land and Sea, where the former is the space of security and History, whereas the latter represents insecurity and emptiness.

In contrast, "wet ontology" breaks with the idea that the Sea is a space devoid of History/story and distinct from Terrestrial Space regarding the production of political imaginaries. The supposed emptiness of the maritime space has as many lines, traces, and narratives as the terrestrial space; in this sense, they also shape our notions of citizenship and belongingness. The project's objective is to explore the representation of the Ocean as a place of variety and production of new imaginaries about citizenship, space, territory, and belonging. 

Duration of stay: December 2023 - November 2024

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Havva Sinem Uğurlu holds a PhD in Religious Education from Ankara University in Türkiye. She has been working in Ankara University Divinity Faculty, Department of Religious Education as an Assistant Professor for two years. Between 2011 and 2022 she also worked as a research assistant at this department. During the 2021-2022 academic year, she conducted/started her postdoctoral research under Teach@Tübingen Fellowship at the University of Tübingen. While she was conducting her project, she also taught lectures at the Center of Islamic Theology of the University of Tübingen. She specializes in the field of higher religious education, pedagogy, and didactics of formal and non-formal Islamic religious education.

Currently, Dr. Uğurlu continues the second part of her postdoctoral project as a Global Encounters Platform fellow at the Tübingen University Faculty of Protestant Theology.  Her research project focuses on the theological basis of religious education. She has proposed to put forward a perspective on the sources of knowledge in the current religious education perspective and the transformation of the knowledge to be obtained from these sources. This research focuses on understanding the sources of knowledge of religious education (with all its sub-headings/fields of study) from both Christian and Islamic perspectives. It also examines how the reference to and interpretation of practical theological sources of knowledge can also be a source of knowledge transformation and how this happens. After examining and revealing this process one of the main problems of the research is to present a scientific perspective in accordance with contemporary understanding of the sources/ways of producing knowledge in Islamic religious education and transforming it into communication and interaction with the target audience.

Duration of stay: November 2023 - October 2024

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Dr. Ponni Arasu is a feminist researcher, historian, activist, legal practitioner, translator and theatre artist hailing from Chennai and currently based in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. She is trained in History at the University of Delhi, the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Toronto. Her academic work is on historical ethnographies of contemporary India, with specific focus on social movements such as the Dravidian movement and the women's movement(s). Her PhD research has led her to propose a theoretical framework and methodology called TamilThanmai. She has done research in India and Sri Lanka on the realities of those marginalised on the grounds of their gender, sexuality, caste, class, language, labour, ability, ethnicity, religion etc. for the past twenty years. Her research emerges from and feeds back into movements for social change that she is a part of. She has taught entire courses and guest lectures in the disciplines of history, South Asian studies, Tamil studies, women and gender studies, Caribbean studies and anthropology at the University of Toronto - Canada, University of Minnesota - USA, University of Tubingen - Germany, the University of Jaffna in Sri Lanka, the Tata Institute of Social Studies, Azim Premji University and the University of Pune in India. She has been evolving pedagogic methods of teaching the history and contemporary realities of Sri Lanka with a focus on rigorous research methodology and critical thinking in non-formal and yet consistent teaching spaces to Tamil-speaking students from all over Sri Lanka. This has taken the form of the “Ezhuval: for young women and social change” that she has designed and co-teaches, hosted at the Church of the American Ceylon Mission, Batticaloa. For the past three years she has undertaken research projects in Sri Lanka including on women farmers' collectives; lives and movements for change of women living with disabilities in eastern Sri Lanka; the present realities of LGBTQIA+ individuals and on the status of sex workers. She has produced theatre work with collaborators in India and Sri Lanka on a range of issues which are grounded in using the arts to further the important process of making realities of the marginalised visible and accessible to all. Ponni is also a trained expressive arts therapist practicing primarily in Tamil among women and queer folks from marginalised communities in India and Sri Lanka. She is the Arts and Catalyst Fellowship holder for 2023 at the Studio for Movement Arts and Therapies in Bangalore. She is currently a Global Encounters fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tubingen pursuing research on the life of the goddess Mariamman among descendants of largely Dalit indentured workers in Port of Spain, Trinidad and among rural communities in Tamilnadu. She hopes to bring her proposed concept of TamilThanmai as theory and method to this work.

Duration of stay: November 2023 - November 2024

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Glauco Vaz Feijó holds a double doctorate degree from the University of Jena, Germany, and the University of Brasilia, Brazil. In his Ph.D. thesis he focused on the processes of (re)constructing identities through the narratives of Brazilian immigrants in Germany and Portugal, with an emphasis on the interpretation of discursive representations of nationalities.  His main research focus for the last two decades has been contemporary international migration between Brazil and Europe, especially between Brazil and Germany and, contrastingly, between Brazil and Portugal. Feijo's research is located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of sociology, history, culture- and critical discourse studies, among others. His theoretical approaches are based on concepts dear to British Cultural Studies and Latin American Decolonial Thought. Methodologically, Feijó’s research draws on concepts from Latin American Critical Discourse Studies and Cultural Analysis of Narratives. 

Since 2016, Glauco Vaz Feijó has been an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Brasilia, Brazil. In 2016 he was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Jena and, in 2020, he carried out post-doctoral research at the University of Tübingen, resulting in the publication of the book Retratos do Brasil na Alemanha: 30 anos de imigração (Portraits of Brazil in Germany: 30 years of immigration). As a Global Encounters Fellow, Prof. Vaz Feijó was co-leading the formation of an international research group with the participation of several Brazilian and German institutions, united around the creation of a large research corpus from the digitalization of German-language periodicals published in Brazil between the years 1852 and 1940. As part of the major project to digitize this corpus, which covers all print runs of around 800 catalogued periodicals, Prof. Glauco Vaz Feijó co-leads the initiative to create the research project entitled Prozesse der Wissensgenerierung deutscher Migrant: innen in Brasilien, 1852-1940.

Duration of stay: January 2024 - April 2024

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Àlex Mas-Sandoval is a population geneticist that studies how evolutionary processes driven by social structure and cultural changes impact the genetic diversity of populations. He got his PhD at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF), in Barcelona, and at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre. There he focused on the reconstruction of the precolonial demographic history from admixed populations of Brazil. Then, during a Postdoc at Imperial College London, he studied how social hierarchies constrain the mating patterns and the admixture dynamics of the populations of the Americas. As a postdoctoral researcher at Università di Bologna, he is focused on understanding the socioeconomic factors that drive assortative mating in these populations. 

Dr. Mas-Sandoval was a short-term visiting researcher at Universität Tübingen in the framework of the Global Encounters platform, aiming to disentangle how social inequalities and population stratification have impacted a wide range of populations across time and space.

Six short stays from June 2023 - March 2024

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Sukhwan Kang holds a PhD in History from Georgetown University in the USA. Between 2017 and 2018, he worked as a research associate at the Université de Franche-Comté in Besançon, France. From 2021 to 2022, he served as a lecturer at Georgetown University, the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, and Idaho State University. Following that, from 2022 to 2023, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz.

Sukhwan Kang was a postdoctoral Global Encounters fellow at the Institute of Modern History at the University of Tübingen. His research project focuses on the transnational Huguenot refugees and their interactions with host societies across the Atlantic world from the 1680s to the 1750s. The English word “refugee” itself originates from the French word, réfugié, and it was first used to describe the Huguenot exiles who fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Despite the Revocation marking the end of eighty-seven years of legal tolerance for Huguenots, the story of early modern France’s largest religious minority did not end. Except for the expulsion of the Jews (1492) and Moriscos (1609) from Spain, the migration of 150,000-200,000 Huguenots into the Atlantic world within a single generation from 1680 to 1710 was the most massive exodus of religious dissenters in the Christian world.

​​The existing literature has mainly focused on the biggest communities: London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Geneva, Berlin/Brandenburg, New York, and Charleston, South Carolina. However, his research pinpoints underrepresented regions despite sizable populations of Huguenot immigrants: Neuchâtel, The Hague, and Frankfurt, Boston-Newport and Dublin-Lisburn. Overall, this project contributes to the historical understanding of Huguenot refugees in the early modern Atlantic world, and—adopting an interdisciplinary approach—explores how issues related to religious coexistence with minorities/refugees have shaped our society in the long term.

Duration of stay: June 2023 - May 2024

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Eva Falaschi holds a diploma and Ph.D. in archaeology from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and a Master of Arts in Classics from the University of Pisa. From 2014 to 2020, she was a research fellow at the Scuola Normale, working on the reception of Greek art in Roman Imperial literature and, in particular, in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. Between 2021 and 2022, her project on art treatises and artists’ biographies in ancient times was funded by the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard University), the James Loeb Gesellschaft / Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (München), and the Getty Research Institute.

As a postdoctoral Global Encounters fellow at the University of Tübingen (Philosophische Fakultät, Philologisches Seminar), she was working on the project “Natural Histories in a Global Perspective. Pliny, Oviedo and the Americas: An Ancient Encyclopedia as a Model to Transfer and Transmit Knowledge”. This research aims at a historical analysis of global knowledge formation. It examines the impact of Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia (c. AD 70) on the understanding and global transmission of “New World” natural history. To this end, the project takes up findings from current specialist literature and asks to what extent characteristic Plinian methods of acquiring and transmitting knowledge (including autopsy, use of oral and local sources, anecdotal narrations, selection and organization of information, criticism of the exploitation of natural resources; aesthetic and religious values of nature; concepts of wonder, marvel, and otherness; ethical, philosophical, and socio-economical themes) shaped the standards, structures, concepts, and methods that made the knowledge of the nature of the two Americas accessible to the European, Latin-influenced culture in the early modern period.

The aim is to make the globality of modern Latin literature visible by using the example of one of the most influential “Northern” models and to analyze the dynamics of the transmission of natural history’s knowledge between the “new” and “old” world from a historical perspective.

Duration of stay: April 2023 – May 2024

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Carlos Nazario Mora Duro holds a PhD in Social Sciences from El Colegio de México (El Colmex), and a Master in Social Sciences from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Flacso Mexico). Between 2018 and 2020, he was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, conducting a project on the migration experience of Mexicans in the city of Berlin. Afterwards, he was a research associate at The Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences: "Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities" at the University of Leipzig.

As a postdoctoral Global Encounters fellow at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Tübingen his research aimed to analyse the integration process of migrants in the post-pandemic period, focusing on Mexican migration to Germany. According to recent data, the number of Mexicans in Germany increased from 10,543 to 18,015 between 2011 and 2019 (7% average annual growth) (DESTATIS, 2020), although some claim that the actual figure is likely to be around 25,000 individuals (Cedeño, 2019). The topic is relevant for understanding the forms of integration of migrant minorities from the South (of the Americas) to the global North after the emergence of the pandemic and its social effects.

His areas of interest are the sociology of religion; migration and integration; and the use of information technologies and social networks in social and cultural change.

Duration of stay: September 2022 - August 2023

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Abbed Kanoor holds a PhD in philosophy with focus on phenomenology of time from the universities of Paris Sorbonne and Wuppertal. Between 2020 and 2022, he was a senior research fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Studies of University of Tübingen, conducting a project on the intercultural philosophy and philosophy of interculturality. He is also a directeur de programme de recherche at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris (2019 - 2025). Before coming to Tübingen, he was visiting lecturer at the universities of Toulouse (teaching phenomenology and political philosophy) and Hildesheim (French contemporary philosophy).

As a postdoctoral Global Encounters fellow at the College of Fellows at the University of Tübingen his research project aimed to theorize a phenomenological framework for the study of cultural ontologies based on comparative philosophy. Cultures claim a total understanding of the world, but when their claims are deprived of recognition, they can be vulnerable to alternative forms of totality, i.e. ideologies. This is exactly where the weakness of the culturalist attitude lies. The same signifier Culture is both revealing, insofar as the “cultural turn” indicates a real encounter of different worldviews and lifestyles, and concealing, insofar as the signified of Culture remains at the level of representation. Cultures are often visible features of an invisible process of sense-constitution, normally overlooked in representational approaches. Cultures are by no means flat spatial entities juxtaposed next to each other in a multicultural order or unequal blocks meeting and colliding with each other in the “clash of civilizations”. If their source of sense-constitution remains invisible, the embodiment of their constant reference to this invisible source is more likely to be traced in their ontologies. It is precisely here that approaches such as intercultural philosophy, comparative philosophy and phenomenology could be useful. What characterizes our world is not only the diversity of cultural traditions that come into contact with each other, but also the reversible temporalities and sophisticated understandings of the world that accompany them. In the background of the "Cultures", we are dealing with specific configurations of the world and complex ontologies, associated with cosmological particularities, multiform anthropologies, specific rhythms of life and multiple ranges of sensibilities.

During his Global Encounter Fellowship, he has organised following workshops and conferences:

27. – 28. October 2022 (Tübingen): Interkulturelle Philosophie und dekoloniales Denken / Philosophie interculturelle et pensée décoloniale

23. – 24. March 2023 (Tübingen): Religions in Global Encounters: Traditions and Ideologies

3. – 5. May 2023 (Yaoundé): Fabien Eboussi Boulaga. Reprise de soi et décolonisation des savoirs

His areas of interest are German and French phenomenology, intercultural philosophy, global epistemology, decolonial thought and postcolonial theories.

Duration of stay: September 2022 – May 2023

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