Freigeist Fellowship for Dr. Robert Kramm

It is our great pleasure to announce that Dr Robert Kramm has received a prestigious Freigeist Fellowship granted by the Volkswagen Foundation. These 5-year grants go to researchers whose project proposals transcend the boundaries between established subject areas.

Robert Kramm is a global and cultural historian of the 20th century with a main focus on modern Japan, the history of everyday life and the history of the body, gender and sexuality. He is currently with the University of Hong Kong.

As a Freigeist Fellow he will join the Munich Centre for Global History with a research project entitled "Radical Utopian Communities: Global Histories from the Margins, 1900-1950". The study analyzes communal projects in the first half of the twentieth century. It aims to write a global history that unearths marginalized histories with new archival evidence and innovative historical narration. It investigates communes in various places of the non-Western world, connecting South Africa, Japan, and Jamaica with Palestine and Manchuria. The communities are showcases for the high degree of mobility and connection in the early twentieth century. Simultaneously, the project critically engages with the image of borderless mobility and ideals of communal harmony. Nevertheless, analyzing people and communities who too often fall through the cracks of mainstream historiography provide unexpected angles to look at the modern world and its make-up from the margins. They open up horizons of possibilities and allow insights into actual accomplished alternative forms of community and subjectivity.

Robert Kramm will join the Centre with the beginning of 2020 and we are very looking forward to welcoming him here!