History that reaches beyond the archive.

My work centers ordinary people's labor and everyday lives. In Namibia, that means focusing on the life trajectory and work of colonial-era migrants, utilising sources such as estate files and photography. In relation to Ghana and West Africa, it is an emphasis on postcolonial urban consumers' diets and culinary choices, affected by globalizing economic and political structures.

I hold a PhD magna cum laude in African Studies from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where my dissertation became my first book, Forged in Genocide: Migrant Workers Shaping Colonial Capitalism in Namibia, 1890–1925 (De Gruyter, Open Access). The book traces the early history of colonial capitalism in Namibia, with a central focus on migrants who came to be key to local economies during the period of German and early South African colonialism.

My interest in digital methods and open access as historical practice began during my PhD — creating the publicly accessible Namibian Worker Database based primarily on colonial estate files, teaching Power BI to historians with limited institutional resources, and running Southern African Perspectives, an ongoing public research project with students — and has only grown since: co-developing an LLM-assisted research database during a postdoc at the Universität Zürich, and, most recently, building a conversational research tool so that the Namibian Worker Database can be explored by anyone, not only those trained to read a colonial archive.