Research Area E: Alternative Archives and Life Writing
Jan Bemmann, Julia Binter, Stephan Conermann, Ann David, Lewis Doney, Nikolai Grube, Marion Gymnich, Judith Hahn, Laura Hartmann, Dorothea Heuschert-Laage, Julia Hillner, Ritesh Kumar Jaiswal, Claudia Jarzebowski, Jakob Jung, Wolfram Kinzig, Walther Maradiegue, Birgit Münch, Neema Munisi, Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anita Pobi, Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa, Alice Toso, Ute Wallenböck, Pia Wiegmink, Viviann Wilmot, Christoph Witzenrath, Theresa Wobbe, Michael Zeuske
The aim of this research area is both to do justice to the strong asymmetric dependencies (SADs) found in (and also obscured by) the traditional archive, and to think beyond the archive in order to hear the voices of the dependent, dominated, coerced or enslaved of history and find out more their lives. Researchers from different disciplines are brought together in RA E by their shared interest in exploring the words, actions, and archival traces of enslaved and dependent people and the question of which narratives of SAD and slavery emerge once lives of dependent people are put center stage. Not only were people living in social relations of SAD often prevented from learning how to read and write, but also archives of slavery and SAD usually privilege records of enslavers and of those in power. Based on the first funding phase’s contextualization of SADs in narrative and identification of biases concealing the lives of dependent people, one of our approaches in this new RA is to look for alternative archives of knowledge which are provided, for example, by the multidisciplinary study of material culture, arts, and literature.
Researchers in this RA are particularly interested in exploring innovative, creative and imaginative methods to find, listen to and restore the agency and the voices and experiences of people who bent to, were forced into, resisted, survived, endured a life in SADs. Attentive to how colonial and imperial epistemologies still determine Western (post-Enlightenment) narratives of freedom and progress, RA E aims to methodologically inquire into archives, their sources and uses, and the kinds of historical, visual, and literary narratives they produce, and seeks to identify and explore alternative sources on the lives silenced by these processes. It is thus closely aligned with our Methods Lab. This RA is also the base of the working group “Life Writing, Slavery and Dependency” that formed in the first funding phase of the BCDSS Our research area members work with a broad variety of life writing documents, some of them found in unexpected places beyond archives of power.
Members of the research area make up an interdisciplinary group comprising literary studies scholars, art historians, archaeologists and historians of Eurasian Steppe, Tibetologists, cultural anthropologists of the Americas, and experts in Church History and Canon Law. We seek to address methodological challenges resulting from archival silences by means of interdisciplinary collaboration and reflection as well as in-depth, case-study driven research in critical archival studies.
Members of this RA meet on a regular basis to share research, discuss key texts, exchange ideas, visit and explore (alternative) archives, and organize workshops and events.
Upcoming Events
5 November 2026, 10:00–12:00: Joint reading and discussion of Ciara Breathnach’s Absence in the Archives of Elements in Historical Theory and Practice, Cambridge UP, 2026.
25 November 2026, 12:30–14:30: Joint visit to the archives of the Bundeskunsthalle, Helmut-Kohl-Allee 4, 53113 Bonn.
Past Events
2 September 2026: Guest Lecture and Conversation with Christian Williams (author of Christian Faith and Namibian Liberation: An Ethnographic Biography of Salatiel Ailonga, Boydell & Brewer, 2025).
17 July 2026: Life Writing Working Group session 27 (discussion of Kadar (1994) ”Whose Life Is It Anyway?” and Ngunjiri et. al (2010) “Living Autoethnography: Connecting Life and Research”).
22 May 2026: Kick-off meeting of Research Area E members.