Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs

The Department of English and American Studies regularly hosts the Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. Internationally renowned scholars join the department as guest professors, collaborating with their Potsdam colleagues to deliver teaching and undertake joint research projects. These professorships play a vital role in advancing the department’s commitment to a distinctly postcolonial orientation in both research and teaching.

Prof. Dr. Katrina Schlunke

Katrina Schlunke is Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania and the University of Sydney, Australia. She is interested in thinking and writing about Indigenous (Australian) studies, (popular) cultural history, critical theory, ecocriticism and has an ongoing interest in fictocriticism, material fiction and queering the postcolonial. She will teach the seminar "Unnatural Histories" in the summer semester 2025.

Katrina Schlunke has previously collaborated with members of the Department of English and American Studies on the DAAD-funded research projects ‘Colonial Entanglements’, ‘Leichhardt's Legacies’ and ‘Experimental Histories’. With Prof. Anja Schwarz she has recently published “The First Beutelwolf: How Berliners were taught to see the thylacine.“ Journal of Natural Science Collections 13 (2025): 3-15. While Katrina is based in Potsdam, the two of them will continue their joint research on the coloniality of natural history.

Prof. Dr. Satish Poduval

Satish Poduval is Professor of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India. His research interests include film and media studies as well as critical theory, focussing on connections and differences between Western and (South) Asian approaches. He will teach the seminar "Just Looking - Visual Cultures in Contemporary India" in the summer semester 2025.

Satish Poduval has worked with some of the colleagues at Potsdam for over two decades. Some collaborative work has resulted in anthologies like The Politics of Passion (University of Toronto Press 2013) and Postcolonial Piracy (Bloomsbury 2014). From 2016 to 2025 he was an international supervisor within the framework of Potsdam‘s Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms. While Satish is based in Potsdam, he will present a paper on the cartoonist as journalist and historian at the international conference „John Berger: the poetics and politics of collaboration“ organized by Prof. Dirk Wiemann.