News and Events
Talk by Peter Müller, President of the Court of Arbitration for Nazi-Looted Cultural Property: On December 1, 2025, the Court of Arbitration for Nazi-Looted Cultural Property began its work. Its establishment is based on an Administrative Agreement between the federal government, the states, and municipal umbrella organizations. It operates on the basis of arbitration rules created specifically for the subject matter of the proceedings and renders decisions in accordance with specially created substantive rules, the “Assessment Framework.” In his presentation, Peter Müller will outline the opportunities and challenges facing the new institution. Following this, selected questions will be explored in greater depth during a panel discussion. Prof. Dr. Matthias Weller of the University of Bonn will serve as discussion partner. Afterwards, the audience is cordially invited to ask questions and participate in the discussion.
This workshop investigates analogue and digital methods for the analysis of namelessness in historical sources. It is part of the project “The Nameless in History”, funded by the Volkswagenstiftung’s 'Open Up –New Research Spaces for the Humanities and Cultural Studies'. This funding initiative supports researchers in the humanities and cultural studies to 'open up' new areas of research and knowledge by jointly exploring complex and previously unexplored topics. For more information, click the link below.
How can the historical and geographic location of Cape Town, perched at the literal hinge of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, reframe our understanding of creolisation? As a former Dutch East India Company (VOC) settlement, Cape Town is deeply layered with the legacies of unfree labor and diasporas from across both ocean worlds. This lecture with Ananya Jahanara Kabir, explores the Cape as a vital transoceanic site to examine how creolisation manifests in diverse creative expressions, from Longarm dancing and Cape Malay foodways to the Afrikaans language and the contemporary visual art of Thania Petersen. Ultimately, She suggests that retrieving these memories of creolisation offers an anti-hegemonic resource for resistance, resilience, and community-building today.
How do workers form and shape places and spaces of re/production in today’s capitalism? This is the central question of the recently published book “Arbeitswelten” (Doutch/Engelhardt/López/Premchander/Wenner, 2026) that introduces perspectives of Labour Geography as a distinct, critical lens within German-speaking academia. The edited volume centres around the everyday lives of workers in contested worlds of labour and offers a holistic, reflexive view of labour as both subject and actor. Thereby this first comprehensive Labour Geography collection in German-speaking academia opens and invites interdisciplinary dialogue. At the book launch, Anne Engelhardt and Michaela Doutch, two of the editors, first introduce and frame the volume’s overarching contribution, while Benjamin Etzold and the editors themselves spotlight their respective chapters, illustrating the merits (and pitfalls) of Labour Geography as a critical research perspective.
On 1 December 2025, the new German Court of Arbitration for Nazi-Looted Cultural Property replaced the former German "Advisory Commission". This new Court is a fundamental innovation in the process of restitution of Nazi-looted art under the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. The new Court will decide the case on specially designed substantive rules: the "Assessment Framework for Examining and Deciding on the Treatment of Nazi-looted Property". The Netherlands have also seen significant developments in recent years. The assessment framework was revised following the so-called Kohnstamm Report of 2020 and, just recently, in March 2026, another report with recommendations on the future of "Heirless Jewish Looted art in the NK-collection" was issued. These recent developments in Germany and the Netherlands will be put in comparative perspectives in a panel discussion with Dr. Tabitha Oost (University of Amsterdam) and Prof. Dr. Matthias Weller (University of Bonn).
How did child labor opposition become a global movement between the 1880s and 1930s, and how do we write its history without a Western bias? Based on Nina Schneider's recent book, this lecture first explores how a diverse but connected network of advocates in the Americas turned child labor into a global concern. Unlike the tightly organized anti-slavery movement, these opponents operated through a loosely institutionalized network, sharing similar tactics and platforms across borders. She also address the methodological challenges of researching this history, specifically the struggle to construct a global narrative that avoids Eurocentric diffusion models and national biases, a difficulty that ultimately inspired the book’s experimental structure.
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.
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.
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.
Is it true that Global Value Chains (GVCs) 'boost incomes, create better jobs, and reduce poverty', as commonly claimed? In this upcoming lecture Benjamin Selwyn will discuss his new book, co-authored with Christin Bernhold, which challenges this mainstream view by introducing the concept of Capitalist Value Chains (CVCs).
Is manumission truly a transition to complete independence? While we usually view "slave" and "free" as absolute states, historical evidence of partial manumission suggests otherwise. Spanning from Neo-Babylonia to early modern Cuba, records show individuals being freed only in "parts," remaining half-bound to their owners. Though treated as a matter of fact, this status created significant legal friction over how to manage a person who was simultaneously property and a free agent. This upcoming lecture by Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, will examine the origins of partial manumission, the legal paradoxes it created, and its surprising persistence across diverse cultures.
The BCDSS invites to a screening of Aisha Can't Fly Away (dir. Morad Mostafa, 2025), followed by a panel discussion on migration-related labour exploitation and intersectional dependency. The film follows Aisha, a Sudanese care worker in Cairo, as she navigates racism, extortion, and precarious work conditions after fleeing war in Somalia. The panel will feature BCDSS Research Group Leader Benjamin Etzold and Postdoctoral Researcher Ayesha Hussain.
How did Black symbolism become central to European apothecary culture? This lecture with Temitope Fagunwa, argues that this imagery resulted from three interconnected factors: the medieval Mediterranean spice trade, the transmission of Arabic and Greek pharmaceutical knowledge, and the cosmopolitan court of Frederick II in Sicily. By linking the material flow of goods like pepper and myrrh to the translation of scholarly texts and Hohenstaufen heraldry, this study identifies a medieval origin for symbols often misattributed to later eras. Ultimately, it fills a historiographical gap by connecting the history of science with the material and symbolic traditions of European commerce.
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.
How did ancient slavery function outside the shadow of the Atlantic trade? While modern scholarship often uses recent history as a universal template, ancient slaving is best understood on its own terms rather than through a Western lens. This upcoming lecture explores three specific areas where pre-modern slave societies differ from modern ones: the immediate proximity to captive-taking, the complex integration of enslaved persons into the family unit, and their primary role as symbolic objects of power.
The event is being held in cooperation with the Academy for International Affairs NRW and the Bonn Center for Reconciliation Studies. As Europe rethinks its foreign policy amidst shifting global political relations, one question remains central: Can cooperation succeed without confronting colonial history? This panel takes Germany’s first genocide of the 20th century in Namibia as a starting point to explore how colonial legacies continue to shape today’s global crises, from geopolitics and inequality to diplomacy and democracy. What does the “past in the present” mean for justice claims and Europe’s future role in the world? With experts Henning Melber, Katharina Hacker, and Julia Manek, moderated by Heloise Weber, the discussion will connect postcolonial perspectives with today’s political challenges, including the rise of authoritarian populism as well as transnational efforts aimed at building relations of solidarity and ‘just repair’.
What happens when the end of the slave trade doesn't lead to freedom, but to a new form of bondage? In our next lecture with Jake Subryan Richards, he will explore the findings of The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2025). Based on a decade of research across four continents, this study uncovers the "forgotten" history of individuals intercepted by maritime patrols and “liberated”, only to be coerced into years of forced labor to "repay" the costs of their own rescue. By examining archival records from Sierra Leone to Brazil and the United States, he analyzes the tension between imperial authoritarianism and the lived experiences of the African diaspora. A challenge to our understanding of emancipation that will examine how empires redefined "freedom" to suit their own economic and political needs.
Throughout the day, participants will be invited to share their reflections on their own research practices, whether based on collaborative projects, individual research experiences or ongoing questions. These contributions will form the basis of a joint discussion on the chosen challenges, opportunities and limitations associated with collaborative and/or intercultural approaches. The workshop opens with a lecture on "Anti-Colonial Praxis: Intercultural Alliances and Indigenous Forest Knowledge" by Juliana Salles Machado of Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.
How does statelessness turn people into ‘bare’ or even ‘subhuman’ life? This upcoming lecture with Nasir Uddin, argues that the shift from statelessness to refugeehood is not linear but mediated by extreme violence, using the Rohingya as a case study. Drawing on the 2017 genocidal violence in Myanmar and its aftermath, it shows how the Rohingya, denied citizenship by Myanmar and recognition by Bangladesh, now live in conditions of protracted displacement, insecurity, and exclusion in Bangladesh’s borderlands, exemplifying life treated as less than human.
How did the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms reshape slavery across the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Middle East? This talk by Behnaz Mirzai, Professor of Middle Eastern History at Brock University, examines the shared origins of Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire—neighboring states with parallel political and cultural structures, including similar slavery systems. It shows how enslaved Africans faced capture, transport, and major identity shifts, and how Ottoman Tanzimat reforms inspired Qajar officials and revolutionaries to pursue abolitionist policies. Through the story of Mahboob Qirvanian, an enslaved African later freed by Constitutional Revolution leaders, the talk highlights both the human experience of Africa–Asia slavery and the political changes that reshaped it. The event ends with a screening of Prof. Mirzai’s award-winning documentary Afro-Iranian Lives.
How did late-nineteenth-century Brazilian thinkers, working within a “Naturalistic Scientism” shaped by positivist and evolutionist theories, represent race and slavery in ways that ranged from claims of Black inferiority to calls for moral reparation, and how did the paternalistic normalization of slavery obscure racial hierarchies and sustain asymmetrical dependencies compared to the more overt racialization seen in the United States?
“Whose Prayers did God hear?” / “Wessen Gebete hat Gott erhört?” This question, raised by a pastor reflecting on churches built for Europeans inside the very castles where enslaved Africans were held on the Gold Coast, highlights the deep historical entanglement of Christianity and slavery. The Schlosskirche, in cooperation with the BCDSS, invites you on Dies Academicus to an evening of shared reflection. We will first hear from Prof. Dr. Markus Saur (Exegesis and Theology of the Old Testament) and Prof. Dr. Michael Schulz (Philosophy and Theory of Religions), both from the UoB. Afterwards, the Rev. Prof. Dr. Roderick Hewitt, President of the International University of the Caribbean, will introduce the Council for World Mission’s Onesimus Project, which addresses the legacies of slavery and modern slavery and promotes ecumenical education and advocacy. Prof. Dr. Pia Wiegmink and Rev. David Brandon Smith will guide the discussions. No registration required.
What does 50 years of Angolan independence really mean? This lecture revisits Angola’s complex history beyond nationalist or Western narratives, exploring how power, memory, and freedom intertwine. Using Palimpsest and Puzzle as tools, it reimagines Angola’s past and present through multiple perspectives.
What happens when 125,000 Chinese indentured men and enslaved African men and women work side by side on Cuban sugar plantations in the late nineteenth century? Nowhere else in history did these groups of unfree laborers meet in the same time and place. This unique encounter raises questions about race, class, and gender: Were the Chinese considered black or white, slave or free? How did the absence of Chinese women shape relations between Asians and Africans? Ultimately, were the Chinese “coolies” slaves like their black co-workers, or did they move toward freedom? This lecture explores these questions through key Cuban archival documents.
This November, the WHO'S GOT THE POWER Film and Discussion Series continues in collaboration with the Förderverein Filmkultur at Kino in der Brotfabrik in Bonn. On 6 November 2025 at 19:00, we will be screening and discussing Sugar Island, a hybrid documentary fiction film by Johanné Gómez Terrero (Dominican Republic/Spain, 2024, 91 min). Sugar Island explores identity, memory, and the enduring legacies of colonialism — weaving together family struggles, Afro-Dominican spirituality, and collective resistance against exploitation. In addition, Sugar Island is also part of this year's Cinescuela Film Festival.
How have African Atlantic artists transformed our understanding of slavery’s legacy? Drawing on Rice’s three decades of experience as an academic and curator, including work with the Whitworth Art Gallery, Lancaster Maritime Museum, and the International Slavery Museum, this lecture explores how artists from the 1950s to the 2020s, such as Althea McNish, Lubaina Himid, Ellen Gallagher, Jade de Montserrat, and Lela Harris, have used their art to interrogate slavery’s history and its aftermath. Alan Rice will show how their radical interventions and acts of guerrilla memorialisation have reshaped museums, challenged dominant narratives, and redefined the field of the Black Atlantic.