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Prior to joining the University of Cologne, I was a Research Fellow in Colonial and Global History at the German Historical Institute London and a Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. During my postdoctoral years, I was a Fulbright Scholar at the Mahindra Humanities Center (Harvard University), an A.W. Mellon and Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Oxford, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. I have also held research and fieldwork fellowships at institutions in Beirut and Istanbul (Orient Institute), Florence (KHI), Berlin (HU and FU), Yale, at Columbia University, and at the universities of Sydney and Melbourne. I am one of the founding project leaders of 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object and was Co-PI of a project on ‘Restitution, Return, Repatriation, and Reparation’ at the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), University of Ghana.

I hold an MA in Cultural Studies, Art History and Musicology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge. In 2025, I completed my HDR (Habilitation à diriger des Recherches) in France. My research has received several awards, including the Dan David Prize, supporting collaborative work with scholars in the Global South, including the Occupied Palestinian Territory. I have extensive teaching and supervisory experience in Germany, at UCL and the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Sydney, and Melbourne, and welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students.

Thematic Interests and Regional Focus

Research Focus

• Preservation practices in global and comparative contexts
• The construction, governance, and contestation of heritage
• Colonial collecting, museums, and restitution
• Theory and history of the field sciences, including anthropology and archaeology
• Memory cultures, including histories of extinction, racial violence, and their commemoration
• Visual and material media, including photography and technoscience

Methods and Approaches

• Critical Heritage, Museum and Archival Studies
• Memory Studies
• Science and Technology Studies (STS)
• Transcultural and Global history
• Holocaust and Genocide Studies
• Migration Studies
• Visual Anthropology
• Autoethnography and reflexive Methodologies
• Public History and Curatorial Practice

Regional Focus

• Europe (including Britain) and its former colonial territories
• The Middle East and South Asia as primary areas of focus
• Transregional connections involving Oceania, West Africa, and the Americas

>> Read more on "The Museum of Lost Objects" (Group project, trade book)

This project rethinks the history of Western museums by challenging the assumption that they function primarily as stable sites of preservation. Drawing on case studies from Britain, France, and Germany, it examines how loss, destruction, and instability—from bombed galleries and flooded storage rooms to stolen or uncatalogued artefacts—have been integral to museum history rather than exceptional. By foregrounding movement rather than arrival, the project situates collecting within colonial knowledge economies. Focusing on antiquities excavated in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, the book traces their trajectories through imperial transport networks into museums and storage facilities in London, Paris, and Berlin. Many objects arrived only to disappear again, confined to basements or excluded from catalogues because they did not fit established classificatory regimes. Such a reconceptualization of museums, informed by ongoing discussions around their decolonization, ultimately serves to underscore their present-day potential. By acknowledging and embracing their perpetual transformation, we can envisage their future role as places of major significance for the multicultural societies of the future.

>> Read more on Museum Storage and Meaning

This projects builds on earlier work to examine museum storage as a central but overlooked feature of modern collecting institutions. While many museums present themselves as spaces of visibility and knowledge, the vast majority of their collections—often including objects acquired through colonial violence—remain out of public view. Storage emerges here not as a neutral technical space, but as the museum’s hidden counterpart.

Shifting attention from galleries to backstage spaces, the project reframes museums as institutions shaped by concealment, contingency, and unresolved (and yet potential) histories. Drawing on global case studies, it analyses storage as a political, ethical, environmental and philosophical problem, asking why some objects are kept but not shown, whose histories are deferred, and how objects are suspended between care and neglect, preservation and erasure.

>> Read more on "100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object"

100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object is an award-winning collaborative digital initiative that challenges traditional museum narratives. The project functions as an "un-catalogue," foregrounding the voices of authors from the Global South to tell the stories of objects that have been sidelined by Western imperial histories. The initiative emphasizes indigenous, accessible, and diverse perspectives, transforming how we understand museum collections.

You can explore the project at 100histories100worlds.org.