Research
My work is dedicated to the relationship between plants, empire, and society in the past and present.
I am currently working on a monograph entitled 'Economies of Nature: German Expertise and Natural History Collecting in Southern Africa'. Drawn from my doctoral research, the book tells a story about how commercial 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. My approach presents three unique opportunities. Firstly, it engages with historical natural history collections held in museums and botanic gardens. Secondly, it explores the roles of 'disconnection' and ‘failure’ in the collection and interpretation of data from colonial environments to imperial metropoles. And finally, it offers a chance to place historical research into contemporary debates about biodiversity loss and climate change in the hugely significant Cape Floristic Region. Tracing the largely untold stories of modest, marginal collectors, indigenous labor, and non-human agents, Economies of Nature demonstrates the pivotal role that commercial natural history collecting in southern Africa played in unsettling how Europeans ordered colonial and natural worlds. Ultimately, this case reveals the unprecedented array of qualitative and quantitative challenges that commercial collecting posed to the European study of Cape plants and makes a broader argument about the active role of Germans in the making of European imperialism.
My next project, 'Parasites of the Vegetal World: Empire, Botany, and the Intellectual Pursuit of Plant Parasitism' aims to offer an historical analysis of plant parasitism in European botany from the eighteenth century to the present. Inspired by my recent research on the root parasitic angiosperm Hydnora africana (Kannip [Khoekhoe], jakkalskos [Afrikaans], uMavumbaka [isiZulu]), parasitic plants offer a lens by which we can begin to deconstruct long-held assumptions about European scientific methods, demonstrating how plants very often challenged practices of European knowledge-making, particularly in colonial settings. By focusing each chapter on an individual plant, the project will build a chronological, thematic, and global narrative which maps the complex intellectual trajectory of this unusual floral trait.