Postcolonial studies have increasingly gained influence in the German public debate during the last two decades. However, in recent years there has been a backlash and a sharp critique of antisemitic tendencies of postcolonial studies, even among progressive parts of the media. The lecture will reconstruct these conflicts and offer explanations for this trend.

Aram Ziai is Professor of Development and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel. He has also taught (among others) at the Universities of Hamburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Accra and Tehran.

The lecture focuses on the findings of the new book Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (Palgrave Macmillan 2025) and proposes a new notion of “ambicoloniality” to analyze the current situation, in which Ukraine has become Russia's territory of obsession, and Russia, in its long-term desire to occupy Ukraine, has in effect subjected itself to Ukraine’s symbolic and cultural dominance. 

Dr. Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian, artist, and curator. She is the author of the book Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the editor of Art in Ukraine Between Identity Construction andAnti-Colonial Resistance (Routledge, 2024) and Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991-2021 (ibidem Press, 2021), among others. Dr. Biedarieva is the General Editor of The Harvard History of Ukrainian Art forthcoming book series. She serves as President-Elect of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) and is the Founder of Ukraine Decolonial Studies Network. She has published texts in leading academic journals and media outlets, such as October, Daedalus: Journal of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, Financial Times, and The Art Newspaper. Dr. Biedarieva holds a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

This talk is devoted to the history of Russian colonialism and how its past has been obliviated in Western thought. It will look at how Russian imperial innocence has been crafted and received and why Russian democratization is impossible without decolonization.

Botakoz Kassymbekova is professor of Eastern European History at the University of Zurich. She studied in Bishkek and Essex. Botakoz Kassymbekova completed her doctorate at Humboldt University Berlin and worked as a postdoc in Berlin, Liverpool and Basel, as well as a guest scholar at Columbia University, New York.

This lecture explores how coloniality and post-coloniality inform Elena Giusti's work on Roman Representations of Africa in the Early Empire. I look both at the scholarship on Roman Africa produced by scholars coming from, or strongly attuned with, post-colonial contexts (e.g. Marcel Bénabou and Jehan Desanges), as well as at how concepts developed by postcolonial theorists have informed the ways in which I read specific representations of Africa in Roman texts (starting from the ‘Imagined Geographies’ of Edward Said, that are alluded to in the title of my monograph). Special attention will be given to the work of Congolese scholar Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, and how his theorisations on the European construction of the idea of ‘Africa’ are relevant both for the ancient contexts and especially for their reception and scholarly history.

Elena Giusti is Assistant Professor of Latin at St John’s College Cambridge. She is the author of Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid: Staging the Enemy Under Augustus (Cambridge, 2018) and co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race (with Rosa Andújar and Jackie Murray) and of an edited volume on Classics and Italian Colonialism (with Sam Agbamu). Her monograph Rome’s Imagined Africa: Antiquity and Europe’s Invention of the Continent is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Postcolonial provenance research is regarded as instrumental for a decolonization of Ethnological Museums. However, it does have certain limitations, methodological settings, as well as potentially eurocentric traditions. This lecture will discuss some lessons taken from researching and curating colonial provenances at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich. 

PD Dr. Richard Hölzl is a historian and provenance researcher at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich. He teaches at the Seminar of Medieval and Modern History in Göttingen. His publications include Umkämpfte Wälder (Frankfurt/M. 2010), Gläubige Imperialisten (Frankfurt/M. 2021), Managing Northern Europe's Forests (ed. with KJ Oosthoek, New York/Oxford 2019, paperback 2023), Mission global (ed. with R. Habermas, Cologne et al. 2013), Schweigen machen (co-ed., Frankfurt/M. 2024) and Kolonialismus in den Dingen (ed., Regensburg 2024).

Starting in 2020, German speaking newspapers—particularly the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—have published a series of articles addressing the decolonization of the discipline of Classics. Under the notion of ‚identity politics‘ and its relation to antiquity, these articles engage with a debate that originated primarily in the United States and has been met with much public aversion in Germany. 

My lecture traces the arguments and distortions that characterize this discourse, which is shaped by anxieties about so-called ‘Cancel Culture’, perceived threats to academic standards and the declining visibility of Classics in schools and universities. I explore the troubling context of this development in Germany, where Graeco-Roman antiquity and the disciplines that study it are either advocated to a broader public as wishfully apolitical or increasingly appropriated again by new-right ideologies. 

By situating the original debate within its critical and postcolonial theoretical framework, I aim to highlight the methodological and epistemological foundations that underpin these discussions but are frequently ignored or misrepresented in public discourse. I will reflect on the need and potential of a diversification of Classics—one that embraces alternative epistemologies and acknowledges the political dimensions inherent in the study of the ancient world. While this may initially seem a niche problem, it will serve as an example for the stakes of the academic study of the premodern past in postcolonial endeavors of the present more broadly.

Saskia Schomber is a postdoctoral researcher (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the University of Munich. Her PhD dissertation (University of Gießen, 2024) studies the narrative aesthetics of two late antique Greek epics. She is the co-editor of Prolepsis in Ancient Greek Narrative (Leiden: Brill 2025) and publishes on critical approaches to Classics. At the moment, she is co-editing a collected volume on Queer Temporalities in Classical Reception and preparing a new project on ancient erotic narrative and embodied narratology.