I hold a Master degree in African history from Leiden University and a Ph.D. in social sciences from the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam School for Social Science Research). I have specialised in the history of Africa and the Muslim World. I am fascinated by human, spatial and intellectual tensions of scale (singular case and generalization, individual and collective, space and boundary, micro history and global history), which come to play in politics, social connectivity and processes of identity formation (nationalism, ethnicity, religion, race), and their representations (poetry and song, media stories, oral histories and discourse, and, to a lesser extent photography and film). I try to analyse these through discourse analysis, translocality and, recently, structuration theory. My findings are usually presented as detailed micro histories, taking the connectivity between these histories and larger processes and structures as an integral part of those histories, rather than as their background. In my work, agency is central and it shapes structure, not the other way around (which, in my opinion, denies history to be human endeavour and would make me lose all hope for change).

So far my work has focussed on the contemporary histories of decolonisation and nation building in Francophone West Africa and the Sahara from the perspective of the Kel Tamasheq or Tuareg people, and on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca from West Africa and its various spatial, political, social, religious and economic dimensions. I also like to write long sentences. This could be an influence of my largely francophone topics and its accompanying literature, but it does not have to be.

Here you can find my CV
You can also find me on Academia.edu

Publications

Here you can find my bibliography

Main publication: Disputed Desert

Courses (in Dutch)

Introduction to Source-Based Research and the Methodology of African History (1Ba)
History of Africa (2Ba)
Global Developments in Historical Perspective (3Ba)
History of Africa (1Ma)
Research Seminar: History of Africa (1Ma)