Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

I studied history, Oriental Studies and the teacher training at Ghent University (Belgium). I experienced this as three stages to becoming a historian: first I learned the craftmanship of the historian, then I was confronted with the fact that a historian (m/f/x) should not only take into account temporal but also spatial and cultural dimensions, and finally I learned that communicating self-acquired insights to others forces oneself to spell out exactly what one allegedly has already understood.

In a context where Belgium was slowly discovering its own colonial past, I could apply my three-stage education to African history. With a doctoral thesis on the Muslim communities of Bujumbura during the colonial period, I was able to familiarise myself with colonial, urban and Islamic history. I focused on local social history, on Belgian, German and British colonial history in East Central Africa, as well as on the Swahili, Islamic and Indian Ocean worlds.

After completing my PhD, I conducted policy-related peace research in Brussels for four years. In an interdisciplinary field and in a city where the multiple bodies of a federal state, the European Union and NATO are located, I faced both the potentials and the limitations of a historian: you need history to understand complexity, but some fast-ticking contexts are more conducive to reducing complexity. I discovered what makes me a historian for the fourth time, and for the first time the challenge of connecting with non-historians.

In 2010, I moved to Leipzig, where I worked at the Institute for African Studies, the Centre for Area Studies and the Research Centre Global Dynamics. Until 2015, I was involved in a BMBF-funded project on area studies and from 2016 onwards in a DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre on Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition (SFB 1199).

In between, I was the Acting Professor of African History at the Universiteit Gent in 2015-2016. In 2022 I was habilitated at the Faculty of History, Arts and Regional Studies at Leipzig University with a thesis on the global urban history of Kigoma-Ujiji (venia legendi History of the 19th to 21st centuries) and also in 2022 I was a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Oxford.

I have taught in Germany, Belgium, Burundi and Ethiopia in German, English, Dutch and French in BA, MA and PhD programmes and in African Studies, History and Global Studies. I care about combining hermeneutic storytelling with historical scholarship, confronting the understanding of the past with questions from the present, and making history understandable whilst learning from it myself.

Professional career

Education