Gesine Brede is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where she is working on the topic "Historia(s) buscada(s). Narratives of the Disappeared Children in Political Discourse and Novels of Post-Dictatorial Argentina". As a member of the mobility programme Trans.arch - Archives in Transition (EU-MSCA), she has been an exchange lecturer and researcher on the consequences of the forensic turn in memory research at various Latin American universities (Universidad Javeriana Bogotá, Universidad Tres de Febrero Buenos Aires, Universidad Pontificia del Perú Lima, Universidad Nacional del Litoral Santa Fe). She is also an associate researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin, where she works on border regimes in French narratives.
Forthcoming publication, co-edited with Roland Spiller: Archives in Transition. Collective Memories and Subaltern Uses (Frankfurter Studien, Narr-Attempto). Her areas of interest include: the discourse of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, narratology of travelogues, semiotics of cannibalism, Blue Humanities and the Anthropocene, archival theory and political soap opera, victim theory and adaptations of ancient tragedies.
As a research fellow at the Maison Française d'Oxford, she is pursuing her postdoctoral project on French and Spanish pirate narratives from the 16th and 17th centuries. The aim of this is to examine the cultural traces of debates on the emerging law of nations (in particular de Vitoria's ius communicationis & Grotius' mare liberum) at the narrative level of the texts and the (not always) heroic mise en scène of the pirate, as well as in representations of water spaces. Only in the fewest cases are we concerned with conflicts on the high seas, but rather with harbours and port cities, bays, coasts and beaches, islands, archipelagos and peninsulas, rivers and their hinterland, etc. While a fear of water is palpable in the Spanish texts (in contrast to the Portuguese), the French, Dutch and English texts are characterised more by geographically inspired forms of travel writing. The question arises to what extent Catholic and Protestant forms of spatial representation come into play here. The focus on France and Spain serves to place two central imperial powers in a rarely pursued comparative perspective in their forms of the demarcation of frontiers, occupation of space, dealing with alterity, self-legitimation, etc. The rich English, including postcolonial, research on the less taboo subject of piracy in this country is used for lasting inspiration.
