Previously, she taught at the University of Cologne, where she obtained her Habilitation (2018) and her PhD (2010) and was a visiting researcher and lecturer at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge (2006-2007). She studied English, Media Studies, and Philosophy at Cologne, receiving her M.A. in 2006; she also holds a diploma in dance from the Rambert School/Brunel University, London. Since 2019, she has been general editor of ANGLISTIK: International Journal of English Studies.

Julia has a long-standing interest in postcolonial studies, with special focus on contemporary Anglophone Indian, African and Australian literatures and cultures. Since 2010, she has been an active member of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS). Her doctoral dissertation focused on ethics and historiography in the works of Amitav Ghosh (published as Tackling the Morality of History. Amitav Ghosh and the Ethics of Storytelling, Winter 2011). She has published numerous articles on contemporary Indian fiction, diaspora, and black female speculative fiction. Among her recent books are the monograph Risk and the English Novel. From Defoe to McEwan (2019) as well as the co-edited volumes Representations of Science in Twenty-First Century Fiction: Human and Temporal Connectivities (Palgrave, 2019) and Teaching the Posthuman (Winter, 2019).

Her main research interests include literature and science (especially risk theory, climate change, posthumanism), intersections between gender and genre and between literature and other art forms (especially dance and theatre), transcultural adaptations studies, processes of canonization, and interactive digital narratives. She is currently working on a project in the field of historical gender studies funded by the Moderata Fonte-Forum of Early Modern Studies (2020-21), preparing a critical edition and translation of the works of the British author Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673).

Julia is also particularly interested in research at the intersection of the environmental humanities, postcolonial and performance studies. Forthcoming publications (2020/21) here include essays on Australian dance theatre (Anglistik Special Issue “Postcolonial Cultural Studies” 31.3) and on the Indigenous Hip Hop Projects; as well as book chapters on climate change drama (Research Handbook on Communicating Climate Change, Edward Elgar Research Handbook Series) and posthumanism and drama (Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism), which will include readings of the works of Australian dramatist, such as Stephen Carleton and Ian Meadows.

His engagement with Yan-nhangu people produced the first Yan-nhangu dictionary (1993-2003), ethnography, Time and Tide in the Crocodile Islands: Change and Continuity in Yan-nhangu Marine Identity (2009) and the Yan-nhangu Atlas and Illustrated Dictionary of the Crocodile Islands (2014).

He initiated a family of award winning collaborative projects with friend and co-researcher Baymarrwangga including the Crocodile Islands Initiative (CII), Genealogical/Geographical Traditional Owner Mapping, the Crocodile Islands Rangers and Junior Rangers programs, online Yan-nhangu Ecological Knowledge data base, Cultural Heritage programs, Yan-nhangu ‘language nests’ for pre-school aged children and Bilingual Bimodal resources.

This interest also extends to her academic teaching: “Teaching Australia in Postcolonial and Intercultural Perspective” (summer semester 2018) will explore the theoretical question of representing cultural identities in view of lesson and sequence planning for school teaching at lower and upper secondary levels, with a special focus on the genres of fiction and short film.

She was also involved in the organization and coordination of the Dr R Marika Chair for Australian Studies at the English Department of the University of Cologne (from 2010-2014).

Her current research projects focus on the polycentric network of Anglophone world literatures and on postcolonial ekphrasis/ literary visuality. Together with Juergen Reulecke she is general editor of the series Forms of Remembering/Formen der Erinnerung (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, since 2004). Recent publications include co-edited volumes on Anglophone World Literatures (Special Issue Anglia, 2017) and on Literary Environments: Ecocritical Theories and Ethics in Anglophone Literatures (anglistik & englischunterricht, 2018) as well as a number of articles on verbal-visual configurations in Anglophone Literatures. She is currently writing a monograph on Postcolonial Ekphrasis and Counter-Visions in Anglophone Literatures – Contacts, Contests and Translations.

She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Australian National University (Canberra, 2014), with additional background in Philosophy (PhD Université Paris-8, 2005). She has extensive experience working with speakers of Indigenous languages in communities of inland Arnhem Land, in the Top End of Australia. In line with her combined linguistic, philosophical and anthropological interests, Maïa Ponsonnet’s research concerns the role of language in humans’ lives, and in particular how language may channel or modify people’s experience and management of emotions. She is the author of a number of articles and books, in particular a 2014 monograph on the encoding of emotions in Dalabon (Arnhem Land) and a 2019 monograph on a comparison between Dalabon and Kriol, the creole that has replaced Dalabon. Some of her work is also available via the website: www.EmotionLanguageAustralia.com

She is the author of Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (2010), which won the ESSE Book Award in 2012. The book investigated the appropriation of the English language taking place in the Australian literary contact zone between an official ‘white’ Australia – the apparent owners of both the land and the English language – and Australian Indigenous peoples. Documenting language variation and rescuing the debate from seemingly peripheral locations – the ‘empty’ Great Sandy Desert, or the abject urban margin – it insisted on the complex, ultimately open-ended and multilateral ownership of the English language by all who inhabit its intersubjective space, rendering the inherited authority of who ‘owns’ meaning problematical and ethically suspect. Her second monograph, Global English, Transnational Flows: Australia and New Zealand in Translation, addressed the central, yet unresolved, theoretical debate concerning the translation of post-colonial English language varieties. Her recent research centers on Climate Change and Climate-induced Migration Discourse, Populist Discourse, and Social-media Activism with many case-studies from the Australian context.  Her most recent monograph, The Evaluation of Risk in Institutional and Newspaper Discourse: the Case of Climate Change and Migration, provides an analysis of the evaluation of climate change and climate-induced migration risks in institutional and newspaper discourse.

She has published numerous articles on postcolonial theory and literatures, especially on Australian literature and culture. She has recently edited, together with Elisabeth Bähr, a collection of essays by Australian and German scholars, ‘And there‘ll be NO dancing’: Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007 (Cambridge Scholars 2017). She has served on the board of the German Association for Australian Studies (GASt) and is a member of the association’s Academic Advisory Council.

Before joining Heidelberg University in 2014, he was Postdoctoral Fellow of the Graduate School Society and Culture in Motion, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales (Australia). Dr. Wergin’s work is located at the intersections of heritage, culture and ecology.

He has published widely on diverse topics such as music, tourism, heritage, environmental activism, resource exploration, as well as more general theoretical aspects of anthropology and transcultural studies research in Australia and elsewhere. Among others, he is author of Der Ruf des Schneckenhorns: Hermann Klaatsch (1863-1916). Ein Heidelberger Wissenschaftler in Nordwestaustralien (with Corinna Erckenbrecht, HeiUP 2018), co-editor of Musical Performance and the Changing City (with Fabian Holt, Routledge 2013) and the Special Issue “Materialities of Tourism” (with Stephen Muecke, Tourist Studies 2014). In his current project, he examines the restitution of artefacts and repatriation of human remains as transcultural processes of connectivity and healing.