Scale, Scope, and End of Berlin's Africa as Spatial Order and Spatial Format & Religion, Stadtraum und kulturelle Differenz im südlichen Afrika

Biographical Notes

Prof. Dr. Dmitri van den Bersselaar (SFB 1199 & Institute of African Studies, Leipzig University, Germany)
Dmitri van den Bersselaar is a social and cultural historian with an interest in economic history and professor at the institute of African studies of the Leipzig University. He specialised in coastal West Africa, specifically Ghana and Nigeria during the 19th and 20th centuries and works on African responses to – and involvement in – colonialism, missionary enterprise, trading and business. Currently, he researches the impact of multinational business on local African cultures of work and labour. Dmitri van den Bersselaar holds a PhD in Social Science from the Leiden University. Before joining the Leipzig University, he held academic positions at the Leiden University (1996-1999) and the University of Liverpool (1999-2017).

Dr. Geert Castryck (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)
Geert Castryck has been employed at the Centre for Area Studies since April 2010. He studied history, Oriental languages, and cultures (Islam and Judaism) at Ghent University and received his PhD in history from the same university in 2006 with his dissertation about the Muslim communities of colonial Bujumbura. From 2006 to 2010, he conducted peace research in Brussels. His academic specializations are: African, Islamic, colonial, urban, and global history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Prof. Dr. Adam Jones (SFB 1199 & Institute of African Studies, Leipzig University, Germany)
Adam Jones studied history and modern languages at the University of Oxford and then volunteered through Voluntary Service Overseas, teaching for two years in Pujehun, Sierra Leone. His PhD thesis, written at the University of Birmingham, dealt with the history of this area up to 1890. A postdoctoral fellowship in Frankfurt am Main led him to develop an interest in source criticism and the editing of early European sources on West Africa. Since becoming a professor at the Leipzig University, his interests have expanded to include twentieth-century sources from East and South Africa, including photographs.

Dr. Marian Burchardt (Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”, Leipzig University, Germany)
Marian Burchardt’s current research focuses on social and institutional responses to migration-driven religious diversity and is divided into two lines of investigation. First, he explores how nation-building shapes the governance of religious diversity in Quebec and Catalonia, and how the responses to religious diversity draw on and mobilise narratives of secular nationhood. Secondly, he explores the urban politics and cultural dynamics around Pentecostal Christianity in Cape Town. In particular, he examines Pentecostal notions of space, and looks at how claims to space are understood and legitimated through Christian idioms.