Prof. Dr. Andreas Eckert

CV

Born 1964, MA History, University of Hamburg 1990; Ph.D. in Modern History, University of Hamburg 1995; Habilitation in Modern History Humboldt University Berlin, 2002; 1995-2002 Research Fellow and Assistant Professor, Humboldt University Berlin; 2002-2007, Professor of Modern History, University of Hamburg; since 2007 Professor of African History, Humboldt University Berlin; 2002 & 2006 Visiting Professor Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris; 2005 Visiting Professor Indiana University, Bloomington; 2007 Visiting Professor Harvard University; since 2007 chairman “Arbeitskreis für Moderne Sozialgeschichte; since 2009 Director of the International Research Center “Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History” (funded by the Federal Ministry for Research and Education); since 2011 Chair Forum Transregional Studies, Berlin.

PUBLICATIONS (10 selected)

• Die Duala und die Kolonialmächte. Eine Untersuchung zu Widerstand, Protest und Protona-tionalismus in Kamerun vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg. (Münster, Hamburg: LIT, 1991).
• Grundbesitz, Landkonflikte und kolonialer Wandel. Douala 1880-1960 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999).
• Herrschen und Verwalten. Afrikanische Bürokraten, staatliche Ordnung und Politik in Tansania, 1920-1970 (München: Oldenbourg, 2007).
• Kolonialismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag [Fischer Kompakt], 2006).
• Ed. with Sebastian Conrad & Ulrike Freitag, Globalgeschichte. Theorien, Themen, Ansätze (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2007).
• Ed. with Shalini Randeria: Vom Imperialismus zum Empire – Nicht-westliche Perspektiven auf die Globalisierung (Frankfurt am Main: edition suhrkamp, 2009).
• "African entrepreneurs and labor in the Cameroon Littoral", in: Journal of African History 40,1 (1999), pp.109-126.
• "Arbeitergeschichte und Geschichte der Arbeit in Afrika", in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 39 (1999), pp.502-530.
• “Bringing the ‘Black Atlantic’ into Global History: The Project of Pan-Africanism”, in: Sebastian Conrad/Dominic Sachsenmeier (eds.), Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 237-257.
• „Afrikanische Nationalisten und die Frage der Menschenrechte“, in: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Moralpolitik. Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), pp. 312-336.
• [Engl. Translation: „African Nationalists and Human Rights, 1940s -1970s“, in: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.283-300].

FRIAS RESEARCH PROJECT

„Connecting Histories of Work and Non-Work. African Labour History in a Global Perspective”

A global perspective on the history of work and labour does not mean simply expanding or complicating Western labour history, nor directing the focus exclusively to the non-European world. Work and labour could provide tools to capture more concretely the ways in which the West and the rest have influenced each other. One of the central merits of global labour history is to stress that free and unfree, paid and unpaid labour should be dealt with equally and that there is no unilinear path from unfree to free labour. The FRIAS research project is part of a larger and rather ambitious attempt to write a global labour history of the 20th century. During my stay in Freiburg, I particularly analyze to what extent a global perspective might offer fresh perspectives on the history of work in Africa, especially given the fact that one of the virtues of labour history in Africa and elsewhere in recent decades has been its microhistorical focus on workers and work in relation to the range of social processes in a particular milieu – gender and ethnicity, for instance. What is the advantage of looking beyond both a specific African locality and region toward wider spatial relationships, in addition to the insight that we are confronted with fuzzy categories and fuzzy constellations?