Participant Info
- First Name
- Edna
- Last Name
- bonhomme
- Country
- Germany
- State
- edna.bonhomme@gmail.com
- Affiliation
- Max Planck Institute for History of Science
- Website URL
- https://www.ednabonhomme.com
- Keywords
- history of science, epidemics, surveillance, environment, feminism, speculation
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Edna Bonhomme is an art worker, historian, lecturer, and writer whose work interrogates the archaeologies of (post)colonial science, embodiment, and surveillance. A central question of her work asks: what makes people sick? As a researcher, she answers this question by exploring the spaces and modalities of care and toxicity that shape the possibility for repair. Using testimony and materiality, she creates sonic and counter-archives for the African diaspora in hopes that it can be used to construct diasporic futures. Her practices troubles how people perceive modern plagues and how they try to escape from them. She co-created “Decolonization in Action,” a podcast series that explores the ways that decoloniality is understood and put into practice by artists, researchers, and activists. She has written for Africa is a Country, Mada Masr, The Baffler, The Nation, and other publications. She earned her PhD at Princeton University and she has previously taught at Drexel University, Humboldt University in Berlin, and Bard College Berlin.
- Recent Publications
Academic Writing
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Review of Joel Cabrita, The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. October, 2019. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52401
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“Epidemics and Global History,” in Independent Social Research Foundation, Issue XVII Bulletin, The Past in the Present, September 2018.
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“The Bubonic Plague In Search of Burial Sites and Memorial Sites in Eighteenth-Century Cairo,” in Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean. Kalamazoo, MI: Arc Humanities Press, 2017. ISBN: 9781942401155
Nonfiction Writing
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“An intimate, transnational, Black ‘Hairspace’,” Griot Magazine, February 2020
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“The Imperial Machine Behind the Cholera Epidemic in Yemen,” Science for the People, January 2020
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“Unsettling the Roots of the Climate Crisis in the Middle East,” Stillpoint Magazine, December 2019
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“An Ongoing Hair Journey,” Daddy Magazine, December 2019
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“The Bones of Reparations,” Commune Mag, December 2019
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“Tunisia’s Surveillance State,” Africa is a Country, November 2019
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“Collective Herbal Healing: Counter-archive in the Making,” Coven Berlin, November 2019
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“Debt is Holding Black Americans Back,” The Nation, November 2019
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“How they Treat Us,” The Baffler, November 2019
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“The Disturbing Rise of ‘Femonationalism,’” The Nation, May 2019
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- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- twitter.com/jacobinoire
- Country Focus
- Expertise by Geography
- Africa, Caribbean, Middle East
- Expertise by Chronology
- 19th century, 20th century, 21st century
- Expertise by Topic
- Colonialism, Environment, Libraries & Archives, Medicine, Race, Science
