SHORT PROFILE
Julia Borst studied Romance Studies and Economic Policy at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg i. Br. and completed her doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 2014 with a doctoral thesis on violence and trauma in contemporary Haitian novels. Since 2015, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen and, since 2018, second speaker of the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies. In 2020, she co-founded the WoC lab “Digital Diaspora”. From 2018 to 2024, she led a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) dealing with the African diaspora in Spain and Afro-Spanish literature and culture.
Currently, she is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project “Afroeurope and Cyberspace: Imaginations of Diasporic Communities, Digital Agency and Poetic Strategies – Unravelling the Textures” (2024-2029, AFRO-EUROPECYBERSPACE, 101110473), which is affiliated to the interdisciplinary and cooperative research platform Worlds of Contradiction. She was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Pize in 2021. Julia Borst’s research interests include, among others, postcolonial theory, Afro-European studies and contemporary Francophone and Hispanophone literatures and cultures (in particular the Caribbean, Africa and the African diaspora).