Sara Müller

since April 2024
Post-doc/project collaborator in the project "Geography and Politics between Northeast Africa and Europe", at the Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection in Gotha / University of Erfurt, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

January 2024 - March 2024
Scholarship holder of the "Scholar in Residence" programme, at the Deutsches Museum Munich

December 2023 
Doctorate in History: "Eine wissenschaftliche Expedition an den Sepik. Objekte und der deutsche Kolonialismus in Papua-Neuguinea", Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Supervisor: Professor Dr Rebekka Habermas (Göttingen), Professor Dr Rainer Buschmann (California State University, Channel Islands)

March 2022 - September 2022
Scholarship holder of a completion scholarship for the doctoral dissertation, at the Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz

October 2018 - November 2021
Research assistant at the Department of Medieval and Modern History at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and in the joint project "Provenance Research in Non-European Collections and Ethnology in Lower Saxony" (PAESE), funded by the VW Foundation

March 2018
Master of Arts in History: "The Study of Geography is the Most Natural [...] – Die Royal Geographical Society und die Erforschung Neuseelands im 19. Jahrhundert"

October 2015 
Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and History: "Das politische Engagement von Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire im Wahljahr 1784. Covent Garden Lady oder weibliche Pionierin?"

Female Adventurers, Rulers and Slaves – Women in North-East Africa at the End of the 19th Century

In the 19th century, numerous European and North American women travelled to different continents to research, work or experience adventures. They either wrote about their experiences themselves, such as the Austrian Ida Pfeiffer, who published 13 books about her world travels, or the Hungarian Mária Fáy Béláné Mocsáry, who reached a scientifically interested audience with her travels. Even though some women recorded their experiences and encounters in writing, there are numerous women who did not. However, these women can also be made visible, as many male travellers wrote about travelling women and women in general in their letters and travelogues. The research work asks which stories were told by and about women, which were concealed and why? In addition, it will analyse what knowledge about politics, power and colonialism in the region of North-East Africa was conveyed through the reports by and about women
The women who become visible in these reports are not only European or North American women. At the same time, travellers such as Werner Munziger report on local female rulers such as Princess Amphilla and their political position in a region on the Red Sea. Women who lived in certain regions, worked as traders or were part of caravans are also mentioned in travelogues such as that of Theodor von Heuglin. The traveller Georg Schweinfurth reports on female slaves he encountered in Egypt, another aspect to be considered in this project. The research project is primarily based on source material from the Gotha Perthes Collection and the holdings of the Gotha Research Library. These are diaries, reports, letters and cartographic works that were brought to Gotha by various, mainly male, actors. The Gotha Perthes Collection contains only one piece of correspondence from a female traveller, Ida Pfeiffer. The Gotha source holdings should therefore be supplemented by further first-person documents by women from other archives and libraries. One example is the Dutch traveller Alexandrine Tinne. Parts of her correspondence, including with the aforementioned traveller Heuglin, who is prominently represented in the Gotha collections, can be found in the State Library in Berlin.
The indexing and analysis of these holdings combines global history and the history of knowledge approaches with self-testimony research and gender history. A look at published and unpublished travel reports and sources by and about female actors enables a new perspective on the local political conditions in North-East Africa, on the Europeans travelling and acting there and on the Africans living, travelling or governing there.

• German Colonial History in Oceania
• History of Collections and Objects
• Provenance Research

Germany Calling! Tiefseekabel aus Guttapercha, in: Blog Deutsches Museum, 2024, URL: https://blog.deutsches-museum.de/2034/06/05/germany-calling-tiefseekabel-aus-guttapercha.

Sagohammer, Schlitztrommel und Holzfigur. Auf den Spuren des deutschen Kolonialismus in der Göttinger Sammlung, in: Kraus, Michael (Hg.), Weltenfragmente. Die Ethnologische Sammlung der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen 2024.

Walter Behrmann. A German Cartographer, Geographer and Collector, in: “Oceanic Art”, 2023, URL: https://oceanicart.com/PROVENANCE/Walter-Behrmann/1.

Trading and Invading: The Kaiserin-Augusta-River-Expedition and its Collecting Strategies in German New Guinea, in: Duhaut, Noëmie/Paulmann, Johannes (Hg.): European History Yearbook. Europe Across Boundaries, Oldenburg 2022, pp. 63–78.

Auf der Suche nach einer Win-win-Situation. Gedanken zur Zusammenarbeit mit KollegInnen aus Papua-Neuguinea und deutschen Provenienzforschungsprojekten, in: Historische Anthropologie (30/1) 2022, pp. 110–115.

Ein Vermittler deutscher Kolonialgeschichte. Der Göttinger Kasuar-Dolch vom Sepik in Papua-Neuguinea, in: Seidl, Ernst/Steinheimer, Frank/Weber, Cornelia (Hg.): Eine Frage der Perspektive. Objekte als Vermittler von Wissenschaft. Junges Forum für Sammlungs- und Objektforschung, Bd. 5, 2022, URL: https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/24589/11_Mueller.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

August 2023 
"Counting Coconut Trees: German Scientific Expeditions at the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea"
Conference: 12th Biennial European Society of Environmental History (ESEH) Conference, Bern.

June 2021
"Finding Shards and Pieces - Traces of the Sepik Expedition in Institutions of the Global North".
Conference "Provenance Research on Collections from Colonial Contexts", Hanover.

April 2021
"Many Roads Lead to Göttingen. The Ethnological Collection of the Georg-August-University Göttingen and the International Trade Routes and Networks", Mainz-Oxford Graduate Workshop, IEG Mainz.

January 2021
Digital exhibition: "Souvenirs aus Papua-Neuguinea? - Die Sammlung des Ingenieurs Hermann Großkopf“. In collaboration with Dr Sabine Lang (Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum, Hildesheim): https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGNvB5-1dpc.

October 2020
„Ein Dolch vom Sepik – Ein Vermittler Papua-Neuguineischer und Deutscher Geschichte“.
Junges Forum für Sammlungs- und Objektforschung“, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Member of the European Society of Environmental History (ESEH)