All Events

What can microhistory reveal that Big History cannot? Drawing on studies of enslaved and free people in revolutionary and abolitionist France, Sue Peabody explores how focusing on individual subaltern lives reshapes historians’ questions and uncovers new perspectives within the imperial archive.

Enjoy Neyen Pailamilla’s artwork for one last time and meet the artist in the exhibition. The artist talk will be joined by Joanne Rodriguez, the co-curator of the exhibition Knowing Plants – Ecologies of Memory and Practice.

How does the Devadasi tradition stay active despite being declared illegal in India? In his lecture, Indranil Acharya will explore the inescapable dependency of the Devadasis on the temple priests, patrons or the influential members of their own community.

The book talk, organized by the ARC discovery grant project “Unfreedom, Voices, Redress: Plantation Cultures of the Western Pacific” (in cooperation with the GHL), will discuss recent publications by a writer, an artist and a historian. The guests will engage in the question how indenture, blackbirding and other forms of dependency re-ordered the Western Pacific after slavery was abolished in the British Atlantic and in the US. It also wants to pay special attention to not only Pacific but also Pacific women’s voices to shed light on the history of vast numbers of Indian, Pacific and Melanesian peoples displaced through (forced) migration and laboring on plantations that emerged in contexts of British (and German) colonial endeavors. Books discussed: Margaret Mishra, Women, Indenture, and Resistance (Oxford UP, 2026) Kirsten McGavin, Untethered: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Papua New Guinea (Kokomo Ink, 2025). Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Ungeographic (Pâtaka Art + Museum, 2025)

What memories does water hold? Drawing on her own family history, Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s exhibition Liquid Archive explores memory, colonial histories, and healing. Through photographs and the video work Mother Tongue (2020), she creates an immersive experience. The film shows the artist together with her mother and daughter at the wreck of the Don Juan — a ship connected to so-called “blackbirding,” the violent abduction of Pacific Islanders and their forced labour on sugar plantations in Australia. Across generations, histories persist: in the body, in the image, and in the sea as a “liquid archive” in which loss, resistance, and care are embedded. The photographs expand this narrative. Submerged in the sea, the women’s bodies become memorials to colonial violence, while also asserting resilience, survival and healing. The exhibition is part of the research-exhibition project “Knowing Plants. Ecologies of Memory and Practice” at the Global Heritage Lab, University of Bonn.

During her lifetime, Emma Kolbe/Forsayth/Farrell (née Coe, 1850–1913), known as ‘Queen Emma of New Guinea’, was one of the most powerful private individuals and economically successful entrepreneurs in the Pacific – a woman of colour in a world dominated by men. Using the figure of ‘Queen Emma’ and her networks as a starting point, this international workshop seeks to examine practices of coerced labour and forced migration and pays special attention to gendered lives on plantations in the Western Pacific (including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa, Pohnpei, and Queensland) and the means to gain knowledge about these lives today. The material traces and histories of these in the Anglo-German Western Pacific and in PNG in particular at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century will be a key focus.

This lecture commemorates Juneteenth as a living tradition of freedom and memory. Professor Tsitsi Jaji traces collaborations between Black poets and concert musicians — from the Jubilee Singers to Grammy-nominated contemporary works — to show how art carries the history of enslavement into collective memory. The event bridges historical fugitive slave advertisements and modern musical settings, culminating in a communal singing of Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing.

What is Black Event Theory (BET)? This opening lecture introduces BET from the ground up: its philosophical foundations, its departure from conventional ontology, and its insistence that Blackness is not a problem to be solved but a structure of being to be thought. Beginning with the temporal rupture at the heart of The Door of No Return: Being-as-Black, and an ambition to respond to the thinking of Toni Morrison, we establish the tripartite framework of Cognition, Consciousness, and Being that organizes the theory before asking what it means to originate a philosophical system from the site of the Middle Passage rather than from the traditions that sought to make the world before it unthinkable.