Sofie Fingado

Sofie Fingado studied Cultural Theory and History as well as Social Sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin and its partner universities in Tel Aviv and Copenhagen. She completed her M.A. studies in February 2022 with a thesis titled »Troubled Masculinities at Guantánamo Bay. Distant Relatives and the Peripheries of the ›Global War on Terror‹«. After the completion of her studies, she received a Research Track scholarship by the Humboldt Graduate School. Since October 2022, she is a PhD candidate at the research training group »minor cosmopolitanisms« at the Universities of Potsdam and Melbourne. In her PhD project, she is working on incarceration in the ›War on Terror‹ and the U.S. prison industrial complex. The project engages with the question how relations between incarcerated and non-incarcerated people as well as between (offshore) detention camps and (domestic) prisons can become the grounds for abolitionist thinking.

At the department of Cultural History and Theory, Sofie Fingado has been working as a student assistant at the chair for Kulturwissenschaftliche Ästhetik und Kulturtheorie as well as an academic tutor for the introductory course Einführung in das Kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten.

 

Publications

With Neela Janssen: »Collective Reading as Practice. On Reading the Far Right«, in: Sofia Varino (Ed.): A Minor Cosmopolitan Collective: Collaborative and Reparative Interventions (upcoming 2027).

»Beyond the Carceral Archive. Relations, Hauntings and Fugitivity in the American Prison Writing Archive«, in: Maxi Albrecht, Marcel Hartwig, Daniel Stein (Eds.): Archiving America/American Archives (upcoming 2027).

With Iris Därmann, Andreas Gehrlach & Waldemar Isak (Eds.): Gegenkräfte – Gegenkünste. Widerspenstige Perspektiven der kulturwissenschaftlichen Ästhetik. Berlin: Kadmos (upcoming 2026).

With Waldemar Isak: »Nicht-Wollen und die Zwischenräume der Ausrede«, in: Iris Därmann / Sofie Fingado / Andreas Gehrlach / Waldemar Isak (Eds.): Gegenkräfte – Gegenkünste. Widerspenstige Perspektiven der kulturwissenschaftlichen Ästhetik. Berlin: Kadmos (upcoming 2026).

With Sven Angene / Camille Buscot / Neela Janssen / Miriam Machein / Undine Mothes / Wagener Ulrike / Jonathan Wilby: Einführung in das kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten. Eine Handreichung. Berlin: Humboldt University of Berlin 2025.

»Leben geben, giving birth. Schwangerschaftsabbruch und unbedingter Empfang,« in: Absalon et al. (Eds.): Empfangen. Die andere Seite der Gabe. Berlin: De Gruyter 2023, pp. 65–72.

»›[…] denn wer alles verliert, verliert auch leicht sich selbst‹. Behältnisse des Überlebens bei Primo Levi«, in: Laura Busse / Andreas Gehrlach / Waldemar Isak (Ed.): Selbstbehältnisse. Orte und Gegenstände der Aufbewahrung von Subjektivität. Berlin: Neofelis 2021, pp. 211–229.

Conference report »Selbstbehältnisse. Orte und Gegenstände der Aufbewahrung von Individualität«, 15.11.–16.11.2019 Berlin, H-Soz-Kult, 22.04.2020, www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-8728.

 

Presentations

»Carceral Relations. Tending to a haunted counter-carceral archive«, Annual Conference of the German Association of American Studies (GAAS), Archiving America/American Archives, University of Siegen, June 2025.

Moderation and Organisation of the panel »Collective Reading as Intervention. On Fascism and Alt-Right Literature(s)«,  conference A Minor Cosmopolitan Intervention, University of Potsdam, Humboldt University of Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin; hosted at Spore Initiative, May 2025.

»Interrelated Bodies in the Peripheries of Captivity«, conference Embodied Histories of the International Society for Cultural History (ISCH), University of Potsdam, September 2024.

»Thinking Infrastructural Relations. The Case against Exceptionality in the U.S. Prison and Detention Complex after 9/11«, conference Postcolonial Infrastructure, German Association of Postcolonial Studies (GAPS), University Konstanz, May 2023.

»›Let’s Make These Prison Walls Quake And Tumble Until They All Fall Down.‹ Politisches Schreiben und Abolitionistische Gefängnispolitiken«, lecture series Kulturwissenschaftliche Ästhetik, Humboldt University of Berlin, May 2023.