Our Members

Short blurb about the kinds of scholars who are part of our group

Jarula Wegner is Hundred Talents Young Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University in China. His research focuses on autobiography, cultural memory, and critical theory. This includes “Autobiography as Critique,” a current project which analyses the emergence of a critical mode of life writing since the eighteenth century, and the ways in which this reconsiders concepts of identity, society, and citizenship.

Previously, Jarula taught at the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. In 2021, he received my PhD also at this university with a doctoral thesis on “Transcultural Memory Constellations in Caribbean Carnivals: Literature and Performance as Critique” (Magna Cum Laude). In the years 2016 to 2019, Jarula was invited as Visiting Scholar to the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York (USA), to the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick (England), and the Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (Trinidad and Tobago).

In 2015, he received M.A. degrees in German Studies and English Studies and a B.A. degree in Chinese Studies from Goethe University Frankfurt. His master’s thesis in English Studies (Summa Cum Laude) received the Calliopean Prize for the best graduation thesis (including B.A., M.A., and Teacher’s Diploma degrees) in the years 2015 to 2016.

Christian Alvarado, Ph.D., is President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. He earned his doctorate in History of Consciousness (with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies) from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2023. His current book project situates the event most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in late-colonial Kenya within the broader history of decolonization in 20th century Africa. By tracing how understandings of this event circulated across transnational networks and cultural formations, this work aims to show how the frameworks to which Mau Mau is put illuminate novel insights into the global dimensions of African decolonization. A historian by training, Alvarado’s work also spans the fields of cultural studies, literary theory, and African studies.

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