Historian • University of Oxford
My research centres on urban and social history, with a focus on the history of infrastructure and popular unrest. A recurring theme in my work is how colonial societies functioned, especially how ordinary people experienced colonialism and how they navigated, shaped, evaded and contested colonial rule in everyday life. I also explore the politics of memory, examining how the colonial past is remembered in both Africa and Europe. More recently, my interests have expanded to include the lives and experiences of Black people in Germany, particularly those who migrated from the (former) colonies. My primary regional focus is East Africa, especially Kenya, though my work spans the broader histories of both the German and British Empires. » more
In this special issue, Avner Ofrath (FU Berlin) and I argue that studying neighborhoods offers valuable insights into the lived realities of colonial cities. The articles have recently been published online as “First View” with Urban History. The introduction is available open access here: “Uneasy Neighbours: Proximity, Sociability and Difference in the Colonial City, c. 1870–1940″.
Together with Saitabau Lulunken, I recently published a piece on the first Maasai group to travel to Europe. In 1896, the German Foreign Office brought 17 Maasai individuals from what is now Tanzania to Berlin to be exhibited at the First German Colonial Exhibition. Our work seeks to tell their story and trace their lives and legacies across Kenya and Tanzania.
Why is there a large stone elephant in Bremen? Why was it called the “City of Colonies”? What do coffee, cotton, and tobacco have to do with the Hanseatic city?
This new book (“City of Colonies”: How Bremen Shaped German Colonialism) explores these and other questions about the entanglements of Bremen and Bremerhaven with European colonialism. As a trading city, Bremen benefited early on from the colonial ventures of other European countries and eventually became a driving force behind the German colonial empire. Since the 1970s, the city has been critically engaging with its colonial past.
Available in German. Hardcover, 288 pages, 25 illustrations, €20.00.
