Research Projects
Current Research Project
Commodifying Cattle. Transforming Livestock Economies and Knowledge Regimes in the French Colonial Empire, 1890-1960
(previously funded by the Leibniz Research Group on the History and Theory of Global Capitalism at the University of Gießen and, from 2019 onwards, by the German Research Council)
This project explores the policies towards cattle and cattle pastoralists in the French colonial Empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The project examines how in various French colonies, most notably in French West Africa, Madagascar and Indochina, administrators, veterinary doctors and other experts came to see cattle as a key economic resource that needed to be harnessed through a series of interventions aimed at promoting commodification, raising productivity and ultimately transforming the pre-existing cattle economies. By analysing these interventions, which ranged from the improvement of local breeds and new methods of cattle disease management to the taxation of cattle, the sedentarization of cattle pastoralists and the establishment of new cattle trading networks and meat factories, this project contributes to various fields of research, most notably colonial history, the history of science and knowledge, economic history and environmental history. While it will shed new light on the multiple tensions, conflicts as well as transformative effects which the imposition of colonial and capitalist logics on rural, especially pastoralist, societies and their environments entailed, it will also enhance our understanding of the role of science and knowledge in French colonial projects of agrarian reform and socio-economic modernization. Through its geographical focus on French West Africa, Madagascar and Indochina, it connects regions that are rarely studied together and that, along with the analysis of their transnational connections, promise to provide a more global view on French colonialism.
Previous Research Projects
Medical Demography in Colonial Central Africa. Measuring and Negotiating Health, Reproduction and Difference, 1918-1945
(Postdoc Project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, 2014-15)
https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/NWGLipphardt_SCoghe_Medical-Demography
Population Politics in the Tropics. Demography, Health and Colonial Rule in Portuguese Angola, 1890s-1940s
(PhD Project at theEuropean University Institute, Florenz, 2008-2014, submitted and defended 2014)
Sklavenemanzipation in Angola im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Libertos der angloportugiesischen Mixed Commission in Luanda (1842-1871)
(M.A. Project at the Freie Universität Berlin, 2007-2008)
Collaborative Research Projects
2015-: Member of the DFG Leibniz Research Group The History and Theory of Global Capitalism, Prof. Friedrich Lenger, Justus Liebig University Gießen.
2015-: Associate Fellow in the Research Project The International History of Rural Development since 1950, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
2011, 2013-2015: Member of the Research Group Twentieth Century Histories of Knowledge About Human Variation, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
2011-2014: Member of the Research Network Population, Knowledge, Order, Transformation: Demography and Politics in the Twentieth Century in Global Perspective, funded by the German Research Council.