Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies

Fabrica de Ideas/ Factory of Ideas Doctoral School 2026
"Worldmaking at the Digital Threshold: Media, Memory, and Cultural Futures in Times of (De)globalization"

The Africa Multiple Research Centre (Kenya) hosts the event in collaboration with the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), Brazil and the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

The Factory of Ideas 2026 is an international doctoral school that will bring together up to forty PhD candidates from Africa, Latin America, and Europe to critically engage with contemporary transformations in media, technologies, and cultural production. Hosted by the Moi University African Multiple Research Centre, the school is grounded in South–South and South–North intellectual exchange, with particular attention to the historical and contemporary entanglements between Africa, Brazil, and Germany.

Theme
Across the globe, digital media and technologies are reshaping how societies imagine themselves, remember their pasts, and project cultural futures. These transformations unfold unevenly, generating both continuities and ruptures, and producing new tensions between globalization and deglobalization, inclusion and exclusion, creativity and control. The Factory of Ideas Doctoral School 2026 invites participants to critically interrogate these dynamics through interdisciplinary, comparative, and practice-based perspectives.

New Publication | Writing the Slave Trade Trauma in Francophone Africa: A Study of Selected Novels

This book examines the narrative and aesthetic strategies through which three contemporary Francophone African novelists: Togolese Kangni Alem (Esclaves, 2009), Cameroonian Léonora Miano (La Saison de l’ombre, 2013), and Congolese Wilfried N’Sondé (Un Océan, deux mers, trois continents, 2018) engage the traumatic legacies of the transatlantic slave trade from the African shore, departing from the diasporic perspectives that have dominated the field. It argues that these works reconstruct the slave trade through what it theorises as traumatomimesis and historiopoesis, aesthetic practices in which narrative fragmentation, polyphonic mourning, and imaginative engagement with archival silences enact the work of a collective trauma that conventional historiography cannot contain. Organising its analysis around the moralities of capture, the spatiality of the trade, and the corporeality of violence, the study shows how Miano’s grieving Mulongo women, Alem’s rehabilitated abolitionist king, and N’Sondé’s silenced Kongolese priest each embody a distinct dimension of what the slave trade destroyed, and how their shared refusal of narrative resolution constitutes a sustained act of mourning and a foundation for African renaissance.

Thierry Boudjekeu Kamgang is a researcher in African literary and cultural studies at the University of Bayreuth. His work examines memory, historical trauma and the cultural afterlives of slavery in African and Afro-diasporic literatures, with particular attention to how contemporary writers engage collective mourning and historical repair.

Dissertation completed at BIGSAS, University of Bayreuth, within the DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence 'Africa Multiple' (EXC 2052/1 – 390713894).

Link to Publication: https://www.avm-verlag.de/detailview?no=E96091668

Call for Applications | Bayreuth Academy International Fellowships 2027-2028

The Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence invites scholars in African Studies to apply for individual fellowships at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies for the academic year 2027-2028. Africa-based scholars are particularly encouraged to apply.

Application deadline: 5 October 2026

Full details in the attached document.

New Publication | A Comparison of Observed and Perceived Seasonal Climate Regimes in a Rural Socio-Ecological System in Northeastern South Africa

This study investigates perceptions of climate change among residents of 12 villages in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, South Africa, comparing local knowledge with meteorological data from 1981–2023. While community perceptions aligned with recorded trends of rising temperatures and more erratic rainfall, discrepancies emerged around total rainfall amounts, highlighting the value of integrating local knowledge into climate change research and the design of culturally relevant adaptation strategies.

By F. Rusere, N. R. Houngue, S. Mkuhlani, G. Soropa, L. Hunter, W. Twine and C. Samimi. Published in Regional Environmental Change (2026).

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02591-1

BIGSAS at the University of Bayreuth is looking for a BIGSAS Management Assistant (m/f/d)

Application deadline: 30 August 2026

Full details in the attached document.

A couple of months ago, at the General Assembly of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, two appointments were made that further strengthen the Cluster's commitment to supporting early career researchers and doctoral education in African Studies.

Prof. Dr. Thokozani Kaime was elected as the Cluster's Vice Dean of Early Career and Equal Opportunity and simultaneously as Head of Bigsas Bayreuth . Professor Kaime holds the Chair of African Legal Studies at the University of Bayreuth and is a Principal Investigator in the Africa Multiple Cluster, with research focusing on African legal studies, human rights, sustainable development and the governance of natural resources.

Prof. Dr. Serawit Bekele Debele was appointed as Deputy Head of BIGSAS. A former BIGSAS graduate herself, Professor Debele holds the Professorship for Gender, Sexuality and Religion with a Focus on Africa at the University of Bayreuth. Her research examines the intersections of religion, gender, sexuality, politics and society in African contexts.

Read more: https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/news/2026/2026-06-25_KaimeVice-Dean/index.html

Last call | AFRICA: translating

The submission deadline for our Call for Artistic Contributions is 31 July 2026. Only a few days left!

We are looking for photographs and images of artworks that engage with the richness and complexity of translation in African contexts and beyond. Selected works will be featured in the Africa Multiple 2027 postcard calendar and contributors will receive an honorarium of €250.

Max. 3 images per person | Landscape format only | JPEG, min. 300 dpi

Full details and submission form: https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/news/2026/2026-06-20_Aufruf_Translating/index.html

Congratulations to Dr. Valerie Nur!

BIGSAS alumna and former Africa Multiple fellow Dr. Valerie Nur has been awarded the Ethnography Research Prize by the Sociology of Knowledge Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS), recognising outstanding and innovative work in ethnographic social research.

The prize was awarded for her book Die Unbeständigkeit der Dinge. Handwerk, Familie und Mobilität bei den Tuareg in Niger (The Impermanence of Things: Craft, Family and Mobility among the Tuareg in Niger), based on 21 months of fieldwork examining Tuareg craftsmanship as a social practice through which knowledge and skills are transmitted across generations.

This is the latest in a series of well-deserved recognitions for Dr. Nur, who previously received the 2022 Frobenius Research Promotion Award and first prize from the German Anthropological Association.

Read more: https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/news/2026/2026-07-15_Forschungspreis_nur/index.html l

What a night at the 21st Afrika Karibik Festival Bayreuth!

This past weekend, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence presented a live concert by MORUMA, a powerful fusion of sounds from across the Indian Ocean, brought to life by Matchume Zango and Childo Tomás (Mozambique), Jean-Pierre Jozéfinn’ (Réunion Island), and Andry Michael Randriantseva (Madagascar).

Thank you to everyone who joined us and to the festival for a wonderful edition.