news
Call for Nominations: GAPS Graduate Award 2025
It’s that time of the year again: choose your fighter and honour your students’ hard work! Nominate an outstanding BA, MA or state examination thesis for a chance to receive the GAPS Graduate Award 2025. You can find more information on the nomination process as well as the endowments of the prize on our graduate award page.
Introducing a new format: reading groups!
Organised by active members of our society, we hope that reading groups encourage engagement on academic topics and create richly collaborative spaces for members and interested non-members alike to discuss works in progress, contemporary trends in their field and more. To begin with, Priyam Goswami Choudhury has initiated the two following groups: The Poetics of Édouard Glissant Reading Group and Postcolonial Environmental Humanities Working Group. Please visit the new webpage for more information.
New project fund announced!
Members of GAPS recently voted to initiate a new project fund that can be used to finance various event types in the field of postcolonial studies starting this year! Only non-tenured GAPS members are eligible to apply. Deadline: 31st October 2024.
GAPS 2025 Annual Conference: Call for Papers Released!
We are excited to share the call for papers for our next annual conference 29 to 31 May 2025. Organizers Gigi Adair and Ellen Grünkemeier (University of Bielefeld) invite papers on issues related to the title “Neoliberal Global Capitalism – Challenges for Postcolonial Studies“. Visit https://g-a-p-s.net/conference/ for more details and the full CfP.
Winner of GAPS 2024 Dissertation Award announced!
The GAPS Dissertation Award 2024 goes to Anika Gerfer (Universität Münster) for her dissertation “Jamaican Creole in Global Reggae and Dancehall Performances: Language Use, Perceptions, Attitudes.” The dissertation was supervised by Profs. Ulrike Gut, Dagmar Deuber, and Edgar W. Schneider. Anika Gerfer will receive the award during this year’s annual conference in Zurich. Congratulations on an excellent thesis!
GAPS 2024 Annual Conference website now online!
This year’s annual conference “Post/Colonial Environments” is fast approaching! We’re very excited to share that the organisers have now released the conference website and, with that, announced confirmed keynote speakers and artists. Registration is also open until 15th April.
First volume of Anglophone Postcolonial Studies published!
GAPS is proud to share that the first volume of our new yearbook series Anglophone Postcolonial Studies has been published with heiUP under the title Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions, Heterogeneities, Knowledges, Materialities. We would like to thank the editors Sukla Chatterjee, Joanna Chojnicka, Anna-Katharina Hornidge and Kerstin Knopf and all contributors for their work. For a detailed abstract and the table of contents click here.
GAPS 2024 Annual Conference: Call for Papers Released!
We are excited to share the call for papers for our next annual conference 9 May – 11 May 2024. Organizers Michael C. Frank (University of Zurich) and Johannes Riquet (University of Tampere) invite papers on issues related to the title “Post/Colonial Environments”. Visit https://g-a-p-s.net/conference/ for more details and the full CfP.
2023 Conference Photos
While looking forward to our 2024 annual conference on “Postcolonial Environments” in Zurich, take some time to look at the photos of this year’s conference on “Postcolonial Infrastructures”. Again a big thank you to the organisers Timo Müller, Dominik Steinhilber and Christina Wald!
New Board Elected
On 19 May 2023, the GAPS members’ assembly elected a new board for the next two years: Prof. Dr. Timo Müller (Konstanz) as president; JProf. Dr. Julia Wurr (Oldenburg) as vice president; Asli Ergün (Frankfurt) as treasurer; and Lucy Gasser (Osnabrück), Hannah Pardey (Hannover), and Peri Sipahi (Münster) on the advisory board. Congratulations!
Visit https://g-a-p-s.net/board/ for more details.
Graduate Award Winners 2023
We are pleased to announce that the GAPS graduate award 2023 will be conferred on Lena Amberge (Potsdam University) for her MA thesis “Worlds of Loss: Absence and Grief in Australian Climate Fiction”, which was supervised by Prof. Dr. Anja Schwarz and Prof. Dr. Nicole Waller.
The thesis has been published on the GAPS website and can be downloaded here (PDF).
A recognition award goes to Katharina Anna Maria Krumpeck (Vienna University) for her MA thesis “Resisting monophony: Collectively plaiting together voices as decolonising Oceanic feminist strategy in four Wan Smolbag plays”, supervised by Univ.-Prof. PD Melissa Kennedy.
Introducing the GAPS Thesis Register
GAPS members do a lot of work supervising BA, MA, Zula and PhD theses. Sometimes, it would be nice to know if others are working with students on similar thesis topics. It might also be helpful for students to link up directly and network with each other for thesis research. We have therefore decided to set up a GAPS Thesis Register to raise the profile of GAPS and its work with undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students, and to foster student research networks in postcolonial studies.
After seeking permission from the student, a student supervisor/GAPS member will need to go to the GAPS website to send a student’s thesis details to the coordinator Dr. Geoff Rodoreda. We have prepared a form to be filled out for this purpose, which you can find here.
Call for Participation: GAPS Diversity Mentoring Strategy
We invite expressions of interest for participation in two projects that form part of the new GAPS diversity mentoring strategy, both of which will be developed over the next 12 months.
- A series of masterclass videos on German academia aimed in particular at international students and/or students without privileged access to the inner workings of the academy. Each video will be ca. 5-15 minutes long on a relevant topic, e.g. “how to write an exposé” or “what funding sources are available for a PhD”. We invite expressions of interest to participate in making such a video, which will become part of GAPS’s new digital content that aims at a wide audience well beyond the membership of the organization.
- A Mentoring handbook. We invite expressions of interest to assist with and/or consult on the writing of a handbook with mentoring guidelines for GAPS members. The aim is to develop a living document focused on how GAPS members can best nurture diversity in the academy and support international and/or POC students and early-career researchers.
Please write to Priyam Goswami Choudhury and Gigi Adair (diversity@g-a-p-s.net) to indicate your interest in getting involved in one or both of these projects.
Publication: Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World
Edited by Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, Marion Gymnich and Klaus P. Schneider. Leiden/Boston, Brill Rodopi, 2022.
GAPS is delighted to announce the publication of Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World, which has been developed from the eponymous annual conference that took place in Bonn in 2017.
Here is the blurb of the anthology:
Poverty and precarity are among the most pressing social issues of today and have become a significant thematic focus and analytical tool in the humanities in the last two decades. This volume brings together an international group of scholars who investigate conceptualisations of poverty and precarity from the perspective of literary and cultural studies as well as linguistics. Analysing literature, visual arts and news media from across the postcolonial world, they aim at exploring the frameworks of representation that impact affective and ethical responses to disenfranchised groups and precarious subjects. Case studies focus on intersections between precarity and race, class, and gender, institutional frameworks of publishing, environmental precarity, and the framing of refugees and migrants as precarious subjects.
Please click here for further details.
Free GAPS memberships available
We invite applications by students who find it difficult to pay the membership fees. The fee will be subsidized by the Sustained Members of GAPS. Applicants should write to the president as well as the treasurer of GAPS, briefly explaining why they wish to be considered under this category.