Research
My work is dedicated to the relationship between plants, empire, and society in the past and present.
My first book, entitled 'Economies of Nature: German Expertise and Natural History Collecting in Southern Africa', is being written for the ‘Science in History’ series with Cambridge University Press. Drawn from my doctoral research, the book tells a story about how competition in natural history collecting and the singularity of southern African plant life upended practices of European knowledge-making in the first half of the nineteenth century. Tracing the largely untold stories of commercial German collectors, Indigenous labor, and non-human agents, 'Economies of Nature' demonstrates the pivotal role that southern Africa played in unsettling how Europeans ordered colonial and natural worlds. What is unique about this work (and my work more generally) is its engagement with historical natural history collections and that it links historical research to contemporary debates on biodiversity loss and plant conservation in southern Africa. This research makes a bold new intervention by placing plants at the center of a story on empire in southern Africa – perhaps the only book to do so to date.
Outside of the book, I am currently writing on several different topics for articles and book chapters, including: the Unio Itineraria and nineteenth-century German scientific societies; parasitism in science, imperial ideology, and anti-colonial thought; the Kew Gardens Colonial Floras project; the legal case involving Friedrich Welwitsch's Angolan botanical collections; plant conservation in the Cape Floristic Region; and natural history collections and climate change. Likewise, I am co-editing a special issue for History & Philosophy of the Life Sciences with Elaine Ayers (Yale University) tentatively titled 'Death, Decay, and Loss in Colonial Botany’.