Dr. Rouven Kunstmann

since February 2025
Teacher of English and History (Social Studies)

August 2023 – February 2025
Trainee teacher for secondary schools at teacher training college Hanover II

April 2021 – April 2023
Second degree in teaching English and history at secondary schools, BA and Master of Education 

since June 2021
Research Fellow at the Research Centre ‘Transcultural Studies/Gotha Perthes Collection’ University of Erfurt

2021
Research Assistant at the University of London (London Business School)

2020
Consultant at the Ministry of European and Federal Affairs and Regional Development (State of Lower Saxony), Hannover, Germany

2018
Postdoctoral Research Associate and Research Assistant in an EU-funded research project (European Research Council) on nationalism, colonial history, development, and ethnicity in Africa at the University of London (London Business School)

2018
Scholarship Holder at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., USA

2018
Doctor of Philosophy in History, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, Title: ‘The Political Press in Southern Ghana and Southern Nigeria: Nationalism, Visuality, and Professionalization, c. 1937 – 1966.’; Examiners: Prof John Darwin (Oxford) and Prof Stephanie Newell (Yale)

2015
Scholarship Holder at the at the DHI in Paris

2013
Visiting Scholar at the Public Records and Archives Administration, Department of Ghana (Nationalarchiv) und der Balme Library, Accra, Ghana

2012 and 2013
Fellowship at the Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA) and Visiting Scholar at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria

2010
M.A. in History, Philosophy and Politics, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany

Colonial and Indigenous Statehood in Maps of West Africa in the Collection Perthes, c. 1817–1933

The research project analyzes the mapping of statehood in West Africa using sources from the Perthes Collection in the Gotha Research Library. The map collection, publishing archive, and publishing library provide insight into how maps generated, reflected, transformed, and disseminated ideas about West African territoriality and state formation south of the Sahara.

The research project asks how maps, as articulations of visual arguments, contributed to a deeper understanding of colonial and indigenous state-building processes, as well as processes of state collapse. In addition, the research project examines how maps visualized and scientifically substantiated ideas of West African statehood, thus representing the earth as a space of possibility.¹ The analysis of sources on West Africa from the Perthes Collection, which have been little researched to date in the context of African and global history, promotes an understanding of the representation of statehood in Africa. In particular, the project explains the relevance of maps of European origin by demonstrating that cartographic and geographical knowledge always implies political knowledge.

The first level of analysis examines how the knowledge of intermediaries in West Africa influenced the cartographic knowledge that formed the basis for the production of the Stieler Handatlas and the publisher's map products based on it. For example, during this period in Senegal, the territorialization of statehood took place amid tensions between the expansion of the French colonial state, the claims to power of the Wolof kings, and the influence of Muslim preachers and commanders. On the second level, concepts of time and mobility are examined in maps and travelogues. The specification of marching routes and transport routes illustrates how space is overcome through different perceptions of distance. The focus here is on journeys between regionally significant cities, e.g., from Dakar to Kayes, Accra to Kumasi, and Lagos to Ibadan and Sokoto.  At the third level of analysis, the project examines contradictions that arise from a comparison of maps of the selected areas. This focus therefore addresses how colonial state actors “deterritorialized” and then “reterritorialized” places such as mountains and rivers.² The relationship between pictorial and textual elements of the maps plays a special role in this analysis, highlighting contradictions between different maps. The concepts of statehood depicted were an expression of performativity and materiality in the text-object relationships of the maps. With the development of the Perthes publishing house into a model National Socialist enterprise, the period under consideration in the research project ends in 1933.

_{¹On this approach and the topic of depicting oceans on maps: Schröder, I., Schürmann, F., Theis, F., u. Weigel, P., „Die Welt im Meer: Globalität in der europäischen Kartographie der Meere des 19. Jahrhunderts“, WERKSTATTGESCHICHTE, 83 (2021), S. 69–83.
² Schröder, I., „Der deutsche Berg in Afrika: Zur Geographie und Politik des Kilimandscharo im Deutschen Kaiserreich“, Historische Anthropologie, 13:1 (2005), S. 21.}

• Colonial History
• History of Cartography
• Decolonization
• Ethnicity
• Nationalism
• History of Development
• Print Cultures
• Photography
• Global History 
• African History
• Global Book History

Review: Johanna Beamish, Im Transit auf dem Ozean. Schiffszeitungen als Dokumente globaler Verbindungen im 19. Jahrhundert, in: WerkstattGeschichte 84 (2021), pp. 158–160. available here

Fashioning Nationalism and the Shaping of the Public Sphere in 1950s Nigeria, in: Journal of West African History 7/1 (2021), Special Issue. 60th Anniversary of Ghanaian and Nigerian Independence, pp. 27–54.

The Memory Process in the Commemorations of the Dead in West African Newspapers, in: Mark-Thiesen, Cassandra/ Mihatsch, Moritz A./ Sikes, Michelle M. (Hg.), The Politics of Historical Memory and Commemoration in Africa, Berlin 2021.

Joseph B. Danquah’s The Akan Doctrine of God: Anticolonial Fragments?, in: Davies, Dominic/ Lombard, Erica/ Mountford, Benjamin (Hg.), Fighting Words. Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World, 2. Aufl., Oxford 2019, pp. 135–150.

Together with Elleke Boehmer, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay and Asha Rogers (Hg.), The Global Histories of Books. Methods and Practices, Basingstoke 2017.

Review: Christopher Prior, Exporting Empir.: Africa, Colonial Officials and the Construction of the British Imperial State, c. 1900–39, in: The English Historical Review 131/553 (2016), pp. 1564–1565. 

The Politics of Portrait Photographs in Southern Nigerian Newspapers, 1945-1954, in: Social Dynamics. A Journal of African Studies 40/3 (2014), pp. 514–537.