Opus Magnum Award for Prof. Dr. Kama Maclean of SAI

We are happy to announce that Prof Dr Kama Maclean is the recipient of a Opus Magnum Award by the Volkswagen Stiftung. The award provides for the consolidated writing time to complete a definitive manuscript of scholarly significance, and will commence on 12 October 2026, for a period of one year. During this time, she will complete her book, Feeling Disobedience: Listening to Anticolonialism in Interwar India.

Extending from her DFG project on sound, Feeling Disobedience adopts a multisensory methodology to offer a rich understanding of the methods, functions and temper of anticolonial mobilisation in interwar India, with an emphasis on how sound shaped the way people taking part in Gandhian movements felt, retrieving the ways in which visual, sonic and haptic stimuli converged to render anticolonialism a densely perceptible, emotional and bodily experience, extending recent studies which focus on tangible sonic atmospheres to explore their political implications. 

In Prof Maclean’s absence, the Department of History will be led by PD Dr Maria Framke. In the Winter Semester, Dr Framke will conduct a lecture on ‘Entangled histories: India, Europe and the world in the 20th century’; a seminar on ‘The history of humanitarianism and development aid in late colonial and early postcolonial South Asia’ and a class on (Auto)Biographies in South Asian History. These courses will be on Heico in the coming weeks.