Lisa Phongsavath

The Trade of Children: Family, Childhood, and Coerced Mobility in the Tai World, 1688–1840

My PhD project investigates the practices of trading children in the eighteenth-century 'Tai world' of central mainland Southeast Asia. I study the coerced and coercible movement of children in its diverse forms, including their sale as pawns and as slaves, their gifting and exchange to families and establishments, their adoption and temporary hire, as well as their abandonment and rescue. Children were displaced across geographical, institutional, and cultural lines. My research seeks to reveal the complex underpinnings of child slavery during this little-examined period of regional tension and global connection prior to colonisation and abolition.

since 2020
Ph.D. in History, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

2017–2020
M.A. in Global History, Free University of Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

2015–2016
Exchange Studies, University of Constance, Germany

2012–2016
B.A. in History and German Language and Culture, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

since 2020
Research Associate in Research Group Coerced Circulation of Knowledge, University of Bonn, Germany

2018–2020
Student Assistant in Communication and Publications, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, Germany

2016–2020
Junior Researcher, Facts and Files, Historical Research Institute, Berlin, Germany

2023–2024
German-Australian collaborative project: Child slaveries in the early modern world: Gender, trauma, and trafficking in transcultural perspective (1500–1800)

2017–2020
Member of Editorial Team, "Global Histories: A Student Journal"

2017–2020
Member of Organizing Team, "Global History Student Conference"