Notes on Contributors
Hélène Blaszkiewicz holds a doctorate in geography from the University of Lyon. Her research focuses on trade and the differentiated uses of infrastructures networks which enable the circulations of things on the border between Zambia and the DR Congo. Her research interests also include African economic policies and industrialisation. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
Jennifer Chibamba Chansa holds a doctorate in African Studies and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Free State in South Africa. She also holds a BA in History and Library and Information Studies from the University of Zambia, and an MA in African Studies from the University of Basel in Switzerland. Jennifer’s research interests include mining, labour and environmental history, and African anthropology. Her PhD research focused on environmental pollution, management and regulation within Zambia’s ‘old’ (Copperbelt) and ‘new’ (North-Western) mining regions. Jennifer’s interest in the mining industry stems from her childhood experiences, having been born and raised in Mufulira town.
Hikabwa D. Chipande is Coordinator/Head of the African Union Sports Council at the headquarters in Yaoundé, Cameroon. He is also lecturer of sports studies in the School of Education at the University of Zambia. Chipande has written and published several journal articles and book chapters focusing on the political and social history of sport, particularly football in Africa. He has received several research grants, including the FIFA Joao Havelange Research Scholarship.
Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu holds a doctorate in History (from the University of Laval in Quebec, Canada). He is Professor of History in the Department of Historical Sciences at the University of Lubumbashi. Since 1990, he has researched the social history of Haut-Katanga, particularly focusing on urban popular culture. In collaboration with Bogumil Jewsiewicki, he initiated the project ‘Memories of Lubumbashi’ of which he is the president of the local scientific committee. He is also the Director-Coordinator of the ‘Observatory of Urban Change’, the research centre at the University of Lubumbashi. He has published several important publications on the history of the region and other topics.
David M. Gordon, Professor in the Department of History at Bowdoin College (Brunswick USA), is interested in the history of Southern and Central African encounters with global forces over the last two centuries: Atlantic and Indian Ocean trading networks; British, Portuguese and Belgian colonialism; changing property regimes; and Christianity. His 2012 monograph, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History (Ohio University Press), considers the influence of Christian spirituality on historical agency in Northern Zambia. His recent publications about Central African kingdoms, warlordism, and prophetic movements have appeared in leading journals. Currently he is enriching this research by investigating the diffusion of art and material culture across South-Central Africa during the nineteenth century.
Enid Guene is a Research Associate in Cultural History at the University of Oxford, as part of the Comparing the Copperbelt project. She has a MA in African Studies from the University of Leiden. Her PhD at the University of Cologne focuses on historical processes of cultural and livelihood change among East African hunter-gatherers. Her current research, building on her MA thesis on cross-border migrations in the Copperbelt, focuses on cultural production and exchanges in the mining regions of Zambia and DR Congo.
Benoît Henriet is Assistant Professor in Global History at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium. After completing a doctorate on labour and power relations in a palm oil concession in The Belgian Congo at Université Saint-Louis in Brussels, he was a research associate in the ERC-funded Comparing the Copperbelt project at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He is interested in the history of agency, everyday life and local-global connections in (post)colonial Central Africa.
Rita Kesselring is a senior lecturer at the Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Basel, Switzerland. She currently works on new mining towns in Zambia’s North-Western Province, making visible the interconnection between global extractivism, commodity trade and urban life at the site of resource extraction. Her monograph, Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory and Emancipation (Stanford Universtiy Press, 2017) is an ethnography on apartheid victims in South Africa and its globally entangled system of human rights abuses. She is also co-editor of the journal Anthropology Southern Africa.
Stephanie Lämmert is a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Her current research deals with the history of romance and intimacies in twentieth-century Copperbelt towns and urban Tanzania and its implications for broader discourses of nation-building and ‘modernity’. Stephanie holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She studied African Studies and History at Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her research interests include Eastern and Central African history of the twentieth century, the history of emotions, Swahili literature and popular culture, and intellectual histories from below.
Miles Larmer is Professor of African History at the University of Oxford and a Research fellow at the University of Pretoria. He has written extensively on the modern history of Central and Southern Africa. His most recent book, co-authored with Erik Kennes, is The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central Africa: Fighting their way home (2016). He is the Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project Comparing the Copperbelt: Political Culture and Knowledge Production in Central Africa.
Amandine Lauro is a Senior Research Associate of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), where she teaches African, imperial and gender history. Her research focuses on gender, race and security in colonial Africa and more specifically in the Belgian Congo. She has published a book and several contributions on these issues. Her latest research about colonial psychology is part of a new research project on the history of colonial expertise and gender-based violence in the Belgian empire.
Duncan Money is a historian of Central and Southern Africa with a particular interest in the mining industry. He is currently a Researcher at the African Studies Centre Leiden and holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. He is the co-editor of Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa (Routledge, 2020) and is writing a book about white mineworkers on Zambia’s Copperbelt provisionally titled In a Class of their Own (Brill, forthcoming).
Iva Peša is an Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her current research is focused on the environmental and social history of the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt. In 2014, she completed her PhD at Leiden University on patterns of social change in Mwinilunga District, North-Western Zambia (published as Roads through Mwinilunga, Brill, 2019). She has published on urban agriculture and environmental thought on the Copperbelt, cassava, labour migration and on the methodological struggles of using oral history.
Christian Straube is a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. He holds an MA in Chinese Studies, Political Science of South Asia and Macroeconomics from Heidelberg University. He completed his Doctorate in Social Anthropology, at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany in July 2018. His research engagement has been focused on the Chinese diaspora in South-East Asia, China-Africa relations, the postcolony in Southern Africa and post-industrial ruination on Zambia’s Copperbelt.
Rachel Taylor is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford, working on the Comparing the Copperbelt project, funded by the European Research Council. She has a PhD in African History from NorthWestern University (Evanston, USA) and an MA in Historical Research Methods from SOAS, University of London. She is particularly interested in how Africans build meaningful lives and communities in times of great social, political and economic change, and her research focuses on gender and labour in nineteenth- and twentieth-century East and Central Africa.