Notes on Contributors
Christin Bernhold
is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Geography, University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests include agro-industries and the economic geographies of class relations and uneven development. While in recent years her (doctoral) research has focused on agribusiness, corporate strategies and class dynamics in Argentinian grain and oilseed commodity chains, she has recently also started to look into the meat industry in Europe.
Karin Fischer
is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Global Sociology and Development Research Unit at the Institute of Sociology at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Her research focuses on neoliberal transformation, global commodity chains and uneven development in historical and transnational perspective. Her recent publications include: Handbuch Entwicklungsforschung, Springer 2016 (co-edited with Gerhard Hauck and Manuela Boatcă); Clases dominantes y desarrollo desigual: Chile entre 1830 y 2010, Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado 2017; Globale Ungleichheit. Über Zusammenhänge von Kolonialismus, Arbeitsverhältnissen und Naturverbrauch, Mandelbaum 2019 (co-edited with Margarete Grandner); Capitalism in Transformation: Movements and Countermovements in the 21st Century, Edward Elgar 2019 (co-edited with Roland Atzmüller, Brigitte Aulenbacher, Ulrich Brand, Fabienne Décieux and Birgit Sauer).
Tamás Gerőcs
is a political economist who is currently pursuing his PhD at the State University of New York Binghamton. His research field of interest is semi-peripheral dependent development in Eastern Europe and labor relations in the automotive industry in Hungary. Gerőcs is a research fellow at the Institute of World Economics, Centre of Economic and Regional Studies. He graduated from the Corvinus University of Budapest (cub) in 2008 with an ma degree in International Relations. Gerőcs is also a member of the Budapest-based Working Group for Public Sociology “Helyzet”. His most recent publications are: “Relocation, standardization and vertical specialization: core-periphery relations in the European automotive value chain” (Co-authored along with András Pinkasz), “Central and Eastern Europe’s Dependent Development in German automotive value chains” (Co-authored along with András Pinkasz), “The Formation of a New Patrie in the Multipolar World-System” (In: Gerőcs, T. – Szanyi, M. (eds): Market Liberalism and Economic Patriotism in the Capitalist World-System), “Conflicting Interests in the Comecon Integration: State Socialist Debates on East-West-South Relations” (Co-authored along with András Pinkasz), “Debt-Ridden Development on Europe’s Eastern Periphery” (Co-authored along with András Pinkasz).
Jan Grumiller
is a Researcher at the Austrian Foundation for Development Research (öfse) in Vienna. His work focuses on Global Production Networks, Industrial Policy and Trade Policy. Recent publications include: “Delivering on promises? The expected impacts and implementation challenges of the Economic Partnership Agreements between the European Union and Africa”, in the Journal of Common Market Studies (2020); “Commodity dependence, global commodity chains, price volatility and financialisation”, in öfse Working Paper 62 (2019); and “Towards an Institutional Setup for Industrial Policy in Late Industrialization in the 21st Century”, in öfse Working Paper 61 (2019).
Santosh Hasnu
teaches undergraduate History at Hansraj College, University of Delhi. His research focuses on the history of transport systems (roadways, railways & airways) and its closed linkages with labor, war and political legitimacy. He has recently, published on labor mobilization for road construction in colonial India: “Disciplining the Hill Tribes into Coolie Labour for Road Construction”, in Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani (eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Bondage and Human Rights in Africa and Asia (New York 2020); “Inception of Aviation Routes between India and China” (Economic & Political Weekly, August 2017).
Klemens Kaps
is a Senior Lecturer at the Department for Social and Economic History, Johannes Kepler University, Linz. His research focuses on social and economic inequalities and trade in Central Europe and Spain between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in a trans-regional and global framework. He has published on trade history, merchant communities and mercantile networks, uneven development, nationalist and anti-Semitic stereotypes. His most recent publications include: “Cores and Peripheries Reconsidered: Economic Development, Trade and Cultural Images in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy”, Hungarian Historical Review 7/2 (2018) and “A Gateway to the Spanish Atlantic? The Habsburg Port City of Trieste as Intermediary in Commodity Flows between the Habsburg Monarchy and Spain in the Eighteenth Century”, in Weber, Klaus and Wimmler, Jutta (eds), Globalized Peripheries. Central and Eastern Europe in a Rethinking of the Atlantic World, 1680–1860 (Rochester 2020).
Andrea Komlosy
is a Professor at the Department for Economic and Social History, University of Vienna, Austria, where she is one of the Global History and Global Studies program coordinators. She has published on work and labor, migration, borders and uneven development on a regional, a European and a global scale, recently: “Work and Labour Relations”, in Jürgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden (eds.). Capitalism: The Re-Emergence of a Historical Concept (London 2016); Work: The Last 1000 Years (London and New York 2018); Grenzen. Räumliche und soziale Trennlinien im Zeitenlauf (Wien 2018).
Miroslav Lacko
Having graduated in Archive and Auxiliary Historical Sciences from the Comenius University, Bratislava (Slovakia) in 2011, he became a Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of History at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava and completed his PhD in History at Comenius University in 2015. His research focus areas are the economic and social history of the Early Modern Age, Central European mining history from the Late Middle Ages to 1945, the economic history of the Habsburg Monarchy, and environmental history. Since 2016, he has been a research associate at the Center for Economic and Social History of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ostrava (Czech Republic) and has been an editor of Montánna história “The Mining History: A Yearbook for History of Mining and Metallurgy” since acting as one of its founders in 2008. Since 2018, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich Christian Lesser College of East-Central Europe at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena (Germany).
Ernst Langthaler
is a Professor of Social and Economic History at the Johannes Kepler University, Linz and head of the Institute of Rural History in St. Pölten. He works on global commodity chains and frontiers with a focus on agriculture and food. His recent publications include: “The Soy Paradox: The Western Nutrition Transition Revisited, 1950–2010,” Global Environment 11 (2018); “Food Regimes and their Trade Links: A Socio-ecological Perspective,” Ecological Economics 160 (2019) (with Fridolin Krausmann); “Broadening and Deepening. Soy Expansions in a World-Historical Perspective,” halac – Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña 10 (2020).
Tibor T. Meszmann
is a Research Fellow at the Central European Labour Studies Institute, Bratislava, a research affiliate at the ceu Center for Policy Studies, and member of the Public Sociology Working Group “Helyzet”, Budapest. His research and publications center on industrial relations and the sociology of work, with a focus on developments in Hungary. His recent publications include: “Precarization via Digitalization? Work Arrangements in the On-Demand Platform Economy in Hungary and Slovakia” Frontiers in Sociology 5:3. February 2020 (with Marta Kahancova and Maria Sedlakova) “Snakes or Ladders? Job Quality Assessment among Temp Workers from Ukraine in Hungarian Electronics” Central and Eastern European Migration Review 5(2): 135–153, 2019 (with Olena Fedyuk).
Goran Musić
is an Associated Researcher at the Research Centre for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. His fields of interest include global labor history, the comparative history of workers under state socialism, and the everyday history of socialist Yugoslavia. His most recent publication is: “Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class: A Story of Two Self-Managed Factories” (ceu Press).
Jörg Nowak
is a visiting Professor at the University of Brasilia. He has published on labor conflict in the Global South, logistics and infrastructure, and Althusserian Marxism. His recent publications are: “Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India” (2019), and “Logistik, Machtressourcen und die politische Ökonomie des Rohstoffexports. Der Streik der brasilianischen Trucker im Jahr 2018” (2020).
Franziska Ollendorf
is a Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (iamo), Halle. Her current research interests include corporate social responsibility and power dynamics in global value chains, the political economy of cocoa, as well as rural change and livelihood systems.
András Pinkasz
is a Head of Section at the Business Statistics Directory and the secretary of the Union at the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. He is a member of the Public Sociology Working Group “Helyzet”. His research interests focus on the political economy of Eastern Europe, especially the changing types of integration relating to the international division of labor. His most recent publications are: “Relocation, standardization and vertical specialization: core-periphery relations in the European automotive value chain” (Society and Economy, 41(2), 2019) and “Conflicting Interests in the Comecon Integration: State Socialist Debates on the East-West-South Relations” (East Central Europe, 45(2–3), 2018). Both of them co-authored by Tamás Gerőcs.
Stefan Schmalz
is currently a visiting Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He has published on uneven development, work and labor and political economy in Europe, China and Latin America. Among his recent publications are: Schmalz, Stefan/ Sommer, Brandon (eds.) (2019): Confronting Crisis and Precariousness: Organized Labour and Social Unrest in the European Union (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield); Ramírez, Martín/ Schmalz, Stefan (eds.) (2018) ¿Fin de la bonanza? Entradas, salidas y encrucijadas del extractivismo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos).
Johanna Sittel
works as a Researcher at the Department of Sociology of Work, Industry and Economy at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena. She is currently writing her PhD dissertation on informal work in the Argentine automotive industry and has published on informal and precarious work in Latin America, uneven development, public sociology and current transformation processes in the automotive industry. Her most recent publications are: Neuhauser, Johanna/ Sittel, Johanna/ Weinmann, Nico (eds.) (2019): Arbeit und Geschlecht im Wandel. Impulse aus Lateinamerika (Frankfurt/New York: Campus).
Uwe Spiekermann
is an associate lecturer at Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany. His research interests include the history of consumption, retailing, nutrition, and knowledge. Among his thirteen books are: Künstliche Kost. Deutsche Ernährung von 1840 bis heute (2018) and Immigrant Entrepreneurship: The German-American Experience (Co-editor, 2016). For additional information visit Uwe-Spiekermann.com.