My current research is centered around a book project about the African diaspora in West Germany after 1945. Focusing on migrant communities from Nigeria, Ghana, and Ethiopia, the book covers a range of themes: from music, food culture, and the arts to feminist literature, student activism, and religious practice. And it pays special attention to urban culture and social life in larger cities like Hamburg, which became home to Europe's second largest Ghanaian community in the 1980s and was the birthplace of Burger Highlife — an innovative, genre-bending synthesis of European disco and West African highlife (check out Borga Revolution, a multivolume set of LPs from Kalita Records, to hear and learn more!). 

In connection with this book project, I recently published a book chapter on refugees in 1980s West Germany for Racism and Antiracism in Divided Germany, an edited volume by Michelle Lynn Kahn and Lauren Stokes that's out with Cornell University Press. I'm also working on piece about Biafran art and activism in 1960s West Germany that will appear in an edited volume on African histories of the Holocaust.

I have a longstanding interest in studying historical connections between Europe and Africa. My dissertation at Duke explored German humanitarian and development aid in Africa after 1960. And my master's thesis in Geneva, which won the Prix Arditi, examined settler colonization and racial discourse between German Southwest Africa and East Prussia from the 1880s to the First World War.

My research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, the Central European History Society, and the German Academic Exchange Service.