Prof. Dr. Sandra Swart
Visiting Professor of Animal and African History, July 2024
SANDRA SWART is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She obtained her PhD in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2001 and simultaneously completed an MSc (with distinction) in Environmental Change and Management, also at Oxford. Prof. Swart works on the social and environmental history of southern Africa with a particular focus on changing human-animal relationships.
She is editor of the Brill book series African and Asian Anthropocene: Studies in the Environmental Humanities, the South African Historical Journal, past president of the Southern African Historical Society and current vice president of the European Society for Environmental History. She has had the privilege of supervising 21 successful PhD students from Botswana, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. She is the author and co-author of over 80 articles and chapters in scholarly books, co-author of two books, co-editor of two books and sole author of Riding High - Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Witwatersrand University Press, 2010) and The Lion's Historian: Africas Animal Past (Jacana, 2023).
She is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History at the University of Sussex and a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.
Prof. Swart will be in Kassel from July 2-16, 2024. During her stay, she will give a lecture entitled "Becoming a Lion's Historian: More-Than-Human Solutions for Living on Planet Earth" on July 8 at 6:15 pm in the Modern Research Colloquium (Campus Center, Room 1111/Seminar Room 2).
This is a story of two species, both apex predators, who learned to live together in a shared world. All-too-often the only story told is of the impossibility of sharing territory: as though the only solutions for human-lion conflict is fortress conservation or extermination. Instead, I reconstruct a range of historical ways of living with lions, as a way of thinking afresh about how we tell more-than-human histories. Together we will track lions into the dangerous wilds of the past, armed only with a new way of thinking about history. Our understanding that animals have their own cultures changes everything. Once it becomes clear that animals have 'cultures', and that these change over time and place, their 'having history' becomes irrefutable - and this history matters to their future.