Dr Dmitri Van Den Bersselaar Ph.D.

Personal Statement

Please note: I will be moving to the University of Leipzig on 1 February 2017.

I am a social and cultural historian with an interest in economic history. I specialise in the history of coastal West Africa, specifically Ghana and Nigeria during the 19th and 20th centuries. My work thus stretches from the time before the arrival of colonial rule into the postcolonial period and the period of structural adjustment in the 1980s. I work on African responses to - and involvement in - colonialism, missionary enterprise, trading and business. I have previously explored the impact of colonial interaction on issues of identity, community, and personhood. This included both discourse and material culture, but was less concerned with formal political structures. I have also been looking at changing perceptions of status, culture, ethnicity and identity in colonial and postcolonial West Africa, and I have been especially interested in the ways in which Africans appropriate ideas and commodities from outside, and make them meaningful as emblems of local communities and identities. At the moment I am working on the impact of multinational business on local African cultures of work and labour.