Professor Anja Schwarz

Professor Anja Schwarz is a Member of the Advisory Board of Menzies Australia Institute. She is the Chair of British Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

Prior to joining the University of Potsdam in 2010, Professor Anja Schwarz taught at the University of Konstanz and the Freie Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2018 she directed the German-Australian research groups Memory and Migration (2010-2012, with ANU; DAAD-Go8), Colonial Entanglements (with UTS; DAAD-ATN), Experimental Histories (with UTS; DAAD-ATN), Waste Matters (with USydney; DAAD-Universities Australia) and German-Australian Anthropological Legacies (with FlindersU; DAAD-Universities Australia).

She 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.

Among her recent publications are the co-edited special issue of Postcolonial Studies on 'German-Australian Colonial Entanglements' (2018), as well as the co-edited volumes Postcolonial Justice in Australia: Reassessing the 'Fair Go' (WVT 2016) and Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South (Bloomsbury Academic 2014).

Anja's main research project over the past few years has focussed on the figure of Tupaia, a Polynesian master navigator who joined the crew of Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the South Seas.