Histories of Map Making at the Horn of Africa, 17th to 20th Century

Marie Huber (HU Berlin)
National Space as an International Project: The National Atlas, Geodesy and Cartography in Ethiopia, 1960–1990

Éloi Ficquet (EHESS Paris)
ETHIOMAP: Digital Humanities and Critical Studies for Exploring Modern Maps of the Horn of Africa, 17 th–20 th Century

Moderation: Steffi Marung (SFB 1199, Leipzig U)

Biographical Notes
Marie Huber (Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany)
Marie Huber is a postdoc scholar at the Chair of African History at Humboldt University in Berlin. During her PhD project, she researched the role of developing countries in the establishment of the UNESCO World Heritage Programme, in particular the case study of Ethiopia. Her research demonstrated the high degree of strategic considerations by all parties that influenced agreements and collaborative work. Additionally, the historical analyses clearly showed that the politicized character of the World Heritage Programme has at its root an ideological and conceptual underpinning of Western-specific discourses of culture, nature, and heritage. Marie Huber’s current research project looks into the economic history of aviation in post-independence francophone West Africa.

Prof. Éloi Ficquet (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France)
Éloi Ficquet is an anthropologist and historian and professor at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). He was the director of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa from 2009 to 2012. His main research intrests are religion, ethnicity and power in Ethiopia through different kinds of material (ethnographic observations, oral traditions, unpublished manuscripts, published texts, maps). Besides many articles on Ethiopian history and culture, he co-authored a French-Amharic Dictionary with Berhanou Abebe (2003), he coedited with Wolbert Smidt The Life and Times of Lïj Iyasu of Ethiopia (LIT Verlag, Berlin, 2014), and he co-edited with Gérard Prunier: Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia (Hurst, London, 2015).