Professor Anja Schwarz

Anja Schwarz  is a Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam. Professor Schwartz co-directs the provenance research project Berlin's Australian Archive and is co-spokesperson of the Research Training Group (DFG Graduiertenkolleg) minor cosmopolitanisms, a programme mainly focussing on PhD training conducted in close collaboration with partners in South Africa, India, Australia and North America. She is also a founding member of the critical habitations network, and from 2020-2022 she coordinated the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair for Global Modernities.

Throughout her academic training and career to date, she has worked closely with Australian colleagues and spent extended periods at various Australian research institutions. Since her tenure, she has been trying, to articulate an understanding of anticolonial and decolonial work that can and must be undertaken in Germany in relation to Australian decolonisation processes. Although not necessarily at the centre of Australian debates, the significance of these processes and debates for German scholars and German research institutions is evident: Germany is implicated in the ongoing unfolding of settler colonialism through its institutions, histories of emigration, and cultural imaginaries.