Frau Prof. Dr. Gigi Adair

I grew up in Australia and studied Gender and Cultural Studies – after detouring through Chemistry, Asian Studies and other subjects – at the University of Sydney, graduating with a B. Liberal Studies (Hons) with Class I Honours and the University Medal. After moving to Germany and working as a translator and travel guide, I completed an MA in English Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, followed by a PhD in English at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies (also at the FU Berlin). My PhD research was published as Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing Diasporic Relations (Liverpool UP, 2019). Before joining the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies at the University of Bielefeld as a Junior Professor in 2019, I worked in the English and American Studies Department at the University of Potsdam for four years.

My research lies at the intersection of postcolonial studies and gender studies. I work primarily on anglophone Caribbean, West African and British literary and cultural texts, and I am particularly interested in questions of diaspora, migration, community, power relations, relationality and kinship, neoliberalism and utopia. I understand literature and cultural production as potentially also forms of knowledge about society and culture, including experiences such as migration.

Education
2011-2015
PhD English, Freie Universität Berlin.

2008-11
MA English Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

1998-2005
B. Liberal Studies (Hons), University of Sydney. Majors in Gender and Cultural Studies (with Honours), Chemistry, Asian Studies.

Current position
Junior Professor for Migration and Anglophone Cultures of the Global South, British and American Studies, Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Previous positions
2015-19
Lecturer (akademische Mitarbeiterin), English and American Studies Department, University of Potsdam, German

2015
Postdoc fellow, University of Tokyo, Japan

Scholarships and grants
2021
Conference grant, Thyssen Stiftung
Conference grant, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF), Bielefeld University

2017–18
Postdoc fellow, DAAD, University of Delhi (Project “Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination: Genre Transactions in World-Literary Space”)

2015
Postdoc fellow, Einstein Foundation, University of Tokyo (Project “Transpacifica”)

2011–15
PhD Scholarship, German Research Foundation (DFG), Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

2005
University Medal, University of Sydney

Professional memberships

• Anglistenverband
• Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien (member of the advisory board)
• Dekolonial e.V.
• EACLALS