History for me becomes especially interesting when I can grasp individual people and their lived experiences. My interest has therefore always been with micro-historical questions and the search for people that often stay nameless in the bigger historical picture. As I am trained as both a historian and an archaeologist, one of my favourite tasks is digging either in archives or in the field for sources that people have left behind.
My academic path has taken me from studying history and archaeology in Berlin, Uppsala and London to a PhD in History at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn. My work as a historian is characterised by extensive archival research and stitching together different kinds of sources to gain an understanding of how people, especially women, navigated their everyday life. In my PhD research, I followed these interests and focused on a topic – or rather a person: the governess Antonia Forster (1758–1823). A member of a well-known intellectual family in the 18th century, Antonia Forster herself has so far remained mostly overlooked in historical research. One aim of my dissertation was therefore to write her biography as comprehensively as possible, in order to shed light on her as a person. For this I visited more than twenty archives across different cities, countries and continents. Using a global biographical approach, my work explored the diverse reasons that influenced Antonia Forster’s decisions and guided the course of her life.
Through the research team that I was part of during my PhD, I got to know Eva Lehner. Besides enjoying her input and guidance while working with church records, I learned that we share similar theoretical and methodological interests. Over the course of my PhD, our discussions of our experiences and the challenges we faced while working with Dutch colonial sources in archives in Cape Town (Eva) and Paramaribo, Suriname (me) were a great help. We explored questions of how to piece different sources together, how to write about marginalised groups and people, be it in colonial or in early modern European contexts, and how qualitative and quantitative research with an intersectional approach might challenge our understandings of categories and the field of action that marginalized groups had. I was therefore more than interested when Eva started telling me about the ideas that she, Dries Lyna, and Wouter Ryckbosch were developing for a collaborative research project and excited when the funding was granted from the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
In my project “In God we Trust? Support Networks of Unmarried Women in Colonial Cape Town,” I focus on the lives of unmarried women in early colonial Cape Town, addressing their complex social realities within a society heavily influenced by the Dutch Reformed Church. Unmarried women, whether they were free, manumitted, or enslaved, occupied a precarious social position in 18th century colonial Cape Town due to their lack of a male guardian. Premarital or extramarital sexual relations posed a threat especially to the honour of women. Enslaved women faced an additional layer of exclusion, as they were forbidden from marrying.
From 1781, parents of children born outside of marriage had to appear in person before the full body of the church council in Cape Town to request permission for baptism. Through analysing their petitions, together with baptismal registers and membership lists, the project uncovers the social networks of these women. Taking an intersectional approach, the project shows how different intersections of gender, religious belonging, and marital and legal status determined the social position of a woman in the Cape colony. In centring the lives and experiences of women and children, the project highlights the support networks they established, the strategies they employed to position themselves within different communities, and how they navigated the social dynamics and power structures of the colonial context.
During my time with the Economies of Trust project, I am especially looking forward to a trip to South Africa and a visit in the church archive in the second year and to contributing to the production of three short documentation clips. With a master’s degree in Public Archaeology and a profound interest in communicating research to the wider public, I am excited to be working on making our research accessible to the interested public.
