Participants

David C. Engerman is a scholar of twentieth-century international history. Building on his dual training in American and Russian/Soviet history at the University of California-Berkeley (where he received his PhD. in 1998), he wrote two books on the place of Russia and the USSR in American intellectual and political life.

He has also researched and written on a variety of topics related to the history of development assistance. His new research focuses on the geopolitics of international economic inequality in the second half of the twentieth century.

David C. Engerman

Alessandro Iandolo

Alessandro Iandolo is a lecturer in International History at the University of Oxford.

He completed his PhD at Oxford in 2012 and was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics between 2013 and 2015, and then Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University in 2016.

Alessandro’s research focuses on Soviet economic and technical cooperation with countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America during the Cold War. His first book, entitled Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, will be published by Cornell University Press in early 2022. The book is a history of Soviet economic and technical cooperation in West Africa during the Khrushchev era.

Simon Toner is a Lecturer in Modern American History at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He received his PhD in International History from the London School of Economics in 2015 and has held postdoctoral fellowships in US Foreign Policy at Dartmouth College and Southeast Asian Studies at Columbia University.

His presentation for this workshop is based on his current book project which explores how international development shaped and was shaped by the Vietnam War.

Simon Toner

Fernando Brancoli is an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a fellow at the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at the University of California - Santa Barbara.

His research interests are centered on how narratives of violence and neoliberalism circulate in the Global South, specially the Middle East and Latin America. In the last years, he conducted field research on Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

Fernando Brancoli

Katharina Schramm holds the Chair for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth, where she is a member of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence. She also heads the research group Anthropology of Global Inequalities. Her research and publications focus on classificatory politics and political subjectivities, with particular attention to race.

Katharina Schramm

Pragna Paramita Mondal is PhD Scholar at Women’s Studies Research Centre, University of Calcutta, India, and Assistant Professor at Narajole Raj College, West Bengal.

Her forthcoming publication on transnational surrogacy, biocitizenship, and statelessness would feature in Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey N. Kingston’s edited volume Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press, 2021).

The study presented at the workshop was conducted as part of her ongoing multi-sited research on surrogacy in India.

Pragna Paramita Mondal

Julia Swart

Julia Swart is Assistant Professor at the Utrecht School of Economics. She teaches and conducts research in sustainability and related areas. Research interests link three sub-fields in Economics, International Economics, Environmental Economics and Development Economics.

Julia is particularly interested in sustainability issues within Latin American countries, and Brazil in particular. She has received her doctorate in Economics from the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Tinbergen Institute in 2012, where she researched the implications of natural resources and the environment for economic development and international relations.

In January 2012 she joined Utrecht School of Economics, at the Utrecht University as Assistant Professor of Economic Sustainability. Since July 2017, Julia is a board member of the PPE bachelor program at Utrecht University.

Alexander Stingl, WIRL-COFUND Fellow, Philosophy and Sociology at Warwick University

- WIRL (Marie Curie) COFUND Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and Center for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM), University of Warwick, Coventry (UK)

- Chercheur Associé, Global Legal Studies Network (GLSN), Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH), Paris (France)

- Visiting Faculty, Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT), Paris (France)

Alexander Stingl

Holger Droessler is a historian of 19th- and 20th-century U.S. history, with a special focus on imperialism, capitalism, and the Pacific Ocean. In his forthcoming book, Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa, he argues that the globalization of Samoa at the turn of the twentieth century was driven by a diverse group of working people on and off the islands.

He has published on a variety of topics, including labor history, Pacific history, environmental history, and global Hiphop. His teaching ranges from modern U.S. history in global perspective to the history of capitalism and environmental history.

Holger Droessler

Ali Kassem

Ali Kassem is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut through the support and funding of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Ali is also a school tutor at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex, where he obtained his PhD in 2020, and a committee member at the Sussex Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.

His main interests are in post-, anti-, and decolonial work, ethnic and racial studies, inequalities, Islam and knowledge-making, on which Ali has published multiple articles and essays. His current research focuses on the lived experiences of discrimination and exclusion of visibly Muslim Lebanese citizens with a particular focus on the role of urbanity – as an institution of modernity/coloniality.

Stephanie Santos is a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She studies 21st century forms of capitalism through the lived experiences of women in maritime Southeast Asia.

Chambi Chachage (PhD) is the 2018-2021 Princeton African Humanities Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer. He holds a BSocSci in Psychological Studies/BA (Hons) in African Studies, MSc in African Studies, AM in History/PhD in African Studies from the University of Cape Town (UCT), the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard University, respectively. He is also in the final stages of completing a book manuscript entitled Africanizing Capital: Emergence of Black Entrepreneurs in Eastern Africa.

Chambi Chachage

You can also contact us by email at decolonisationgroup@gmail.com