Dr. Jutta Wimmler

Berlin’s Ethnological Museum and the German Loango Expedition: The Genesis and Maintenance of Epistemic Dependencies

My project engages with the German expedition to the West Central African Loango Coast (1873–1876), initiated by Adolf Bastian – the first director of the ethnological museum in Berlin who is also considered the founding father of German ethnology. Although Bastian himself travelled to the Loango Coast and stayed there for three months, the expedition has been sidelined in historical scholarship and is only really familiar to historians of the Loango Coast. Even they, however, know little about the specifics. In part, this sidelining has to do with the fact that the Loango coast was not German colonial territory; additionally, the expedition was considered a "failure." Yet it produced several published books that now function as important historical and ethnographic sources for the region. Aside from reconstructing the expedition itself, I engage with the objects collected during this expedition that have since formed part of the Berlin museum’s collection. I hope to establish and facilitate a conversation and collaboration between Berlin’s ethnological museum and pertinent heritage institutions in the African countries in question, ideally to develop a joint strategy of using this shared history in a productive way that benefits all sides.

2020–2025
Research Group Leader "The Concept of Slavery in African History,” Research Area A, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

2011–2020
Postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Chair of Comparative European Economic and Social History, European University Viadrina, Germany

2015–2019
Co-director of the DFG-funded project The Globalized Periphery: Atlantic Commerce, Socioeconomic and Cultural Change in Central Europe (c.1680–1850), European University Viadrina, Germany (with Klaus Weber)

2008–2011
Doctoral researcher in the FWF-funded project Cultural Exchange from the Southern Atlantic to Central Europe in Times of War and Crisis (1640–1740): France and Spain as Mediators for the Habsburg Empire, University of Graz, Austria (directed by Renate Pieper)

2008–2011
Ph.D. Studies, Department of History, University of Graz, Austria

2008–2012
M.A. Studies, Comparative Religion (Religionswissenschaft), University of Graz, Austria

2003–2008
M.A. Studies (Diplomstudium), Department of History, University of Graz, Austria

09/2026–01/2027
Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, Germany. Stipend from the Prussian Sea Trade Foundation

07–10/2016
Research Stipend at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Germany

08–09/2014
Karl-Ferdinand-Werner Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Paris, France

03–06/2013
Research Fellow at the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Art and Design Linz in Vienna, Austria