About

Anja Schwarz joined the University of Potsdam in 2010, having previously taught at the University of Konstanz and the Freie Universität Berlin.

From 2010 to 2018, she directed a series of German–Australian research collaborations funded by the DAAD, including Memory and Migration (2010–2012, with the Australian National University; DAAD–Go8), Colonial Entanglements (with the University of Technology Sydney; DAAD–ATN), Experimental Histories (with UTS; DAAD–ATN), Waste Matters (with the University of Sydney; DAAD–Universities Australia), and German–Australian Anthropological Legacies (with Flinders University; DAAD–Universities Australia). With additional DAAD funding, she coordinated the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair for Global Modernities from 2020 to 2022.

With funding from the German Lost Art Foundation, she currently co-directs the provenance research projects Berlin's Australian Archive (2022–2025) and London’s Commercial Supply of Oceanic Cultural Belongings and Ancestors to German Museums (2026–2027).

From 2021 to 2025, Anja Schwarz served as co-spokesperson of the Research Training Group (DFG Graduiertenkolleg) minor cosmopolitanisms, an international PhD programme conducted in close collaboration with partners in South Africa, India, Australia, and North America. She is also a principal investigator of the Research Unit (DFG Forschergruppe) collaborations: assemblages, articulations, alliances and a member of Potsdam's Postcolonial Studies Collective.

Her recent research focuses on the figure of Tupaia, the Polynesian master navigator who sailed with Captain James Cook in the late eighteenth century, and on the colonial legacy of German natural history in Australia.

In 2015, Anja Schwarz was appointed German research expert to the Australia Germany Advisory Group.