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Prof. Dr. Lars Eckstein

Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures outside of Britain and the US, Department of English and American Studies, Universität Potsdam | Project Oceanean Poetic Collaborations

Supervisor's Main Webpage

Academic Background

Lars Eckstein has been Chair of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Potsdam since 2009. He has published widely in the field of postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Between 2016 and 2025, he was co-spokesperson of the Research Training Group (DFG Graduiertenkolleg) minor cosmopolitanisms. From 2027, he will he co-spokesperson of a new International Research Training Group (with the University of Melbourne) titled Cultures of Repair. Since 2025, he is a member of the Research Unit (DFG Forschungskolleg) Collaborations: Assemblages, Articulations, Alliances, running a project on Oceanian Poetic Collaborations. Since the early 2010s, one of his main research projects has focussed on the figure of Tupaia, a Polynesian master navigator who joined the crew of Captain James Cook on his first voyage to Oceania.

Select Publications

  • "Tupaia’s Wind Positioning System: (Re)Modelling Ancestral Polynesian Voyaging". The Journal of Pacific History. Online first, pp 1-61. full text at:  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223344.2025.2562855
  • Translated as: "Le rua mata'i de Tupaia: (Re)modélisation de la navigation polyésienne ancestrale". Tr. Lars Eckstein et Hereata Pereyre. Bulletin de la Société des Etudes Océaniennes, Tahiti, 2025, n°365 (Janvier/Avril 2025): 5-109.
  • (with Anja Schwarz) “The Making of Tupaia’s Map: A Story of the Extent and Mastery of Polynesian Navigation, Competing Systems of Wayfinding on James Cook’s Endeavour, and the Invention of an Ingenious Cartographic System”. The Journal of Pacific History 54.1 (2019): 1-95. full text at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223344.2018.1512369
  • Translated as Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz, La carte de Tupaia, maître d'astres et de navigation polynésienne. Trans. and intr. Serge Dunis. Bulletin de la Societé des Études Océaniennes (Polynésie orientale) no°348 (Mai/Août 2019). 153 pp. full text at: www.uni-potsdam.de/fileadmin/projects/iaa-alc/docs/BSEO_348_du_14oct.pdf