profile
I am a historian of decolonisation and development in the Department of International History and Politics. I am interested in how these processes (re)shaped societies and what answers they provided to the question of how the world should be ordered; I seek to understand how those struggles and imaginations still resonate today.
My thesis pursues these questions through the history of the Institut Africain de Genève (from 1977 Institut universitaire d’études du développement), one of the Geneva Graduate Institute’s predecessor institutions, where anticolonial activists, state functionaries, development practitioners, and their critics argued over what development might mean in the wake of decolonisation. Reconstructing teachers and students’ ideas and paths, I show how a Third Worldist community recast development as a project of liberation and, a generation later, rejected development itself. In my MA thesis, I portrayed an investment-protection business association, which, as decolonisation threatened its member companies’ investments abroad, lobbied for international norms to shield private capital.
Together with my friends Atwa Jaber and Devarya Srivastava I co-organise the “Decolonization Now” workshop series that convenes scholars and practitioners around four themes—Archives, Pedagogies, Aesthetics, and Promises. In 2025–26, I spent a year as a visiting researcher at the University of Chicago’s Division of the Social Sciences, working with my external advisor Adom Getachew. Before my life in academia, I worked as a consultant and communications specialist.
phd thesis
Title: Between Faith and Critique: Decolonisation, Development and the Institut Africain de Genève, ca. 1960-1990
PhD co-supervisors: Cyrus Schayegh & Nicole Bourbonnais
Internal second reader: Aidan Russell
External reader: Adom Getachew
Expected completion date: 2026
Between Faith and Critique traces the history of the Institut Africain de Genève (IAG) across three decades, from its founding context in 1961 to the intellectual rupture of the mid-1980s. Geneva’s political and academic elites launched the Institute as a gesture of solidarity by a neutral Switzerland that claimed distance from empire, designed to educate a postcolonial elite and bind it to a Western liberal order. However, both teachers and students appropriated that space and made it their own. They forged a vibrant communauté de pensée that recast development as liberation from economic and epistemic domination. This milieu drew anti-colonial activists and dissident intellectuals into what one UN observer called “an island of the Third World.” My dissertation studies the people that populated the Institute, their ideas and paths, and the socio-political context in which they worked. I explore what these histories can tell us about the larger meaning of decolonisation and development in this period.
The thesis spans an arc from faith in development to development as faith. A first generation of ‘engaged’ Christians sought to actualise Christianity and politicise development as liberation. A younger generation then turned their theological literacy against development and denounced it as a secular form of religion, and its adherents as (misguided) believers.
My research weaves together social, intellectual, and institutional histories, building on archival materials such as correspondence, course descriptions, and reports, but also oral history interviews. I interviewed 25 former students and faculty members in five countries: Switzerland, Brazil, Chile, the United States, and Mexico.
Selected publications and Works
Peer-reviewed articles
- "An Island of the Third World? Decolonization, Solidarity and the Critique of Development During the Long Sixties at the Geneva Africa Institute.” in the special issue "Cold War Internationalisms of/in the Decolonizing World," The Global Sixties.
- “What Investors Want from Whom: International Economic Institutions and The International Association for the Promotion and the Protection of Private Foreign Investments (APPI) 1958–1974.” With Filip Batselé. Business and Politics (2024).
Other academic writing
- “The Geneva Graduate Institute and the Training of Diplomats in the Context of Decolonisation.” With Charlotte Roy. Global Challenges 17 (May 2025).
- “Remeasuring Self and Society after Empire: The Human Sciences in Decolonization.” Conference report, with Devarya Srivastava. H-Soz-Kult (2025).
- "The International Association for the Promotion and Protection of Private Foreign Investments" Overture to the Middle East (1975–77).” Twentieth-Century Global MENA Histories Primary Source Collection, Exeter University Digital Archive of the Middle East.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
- History of science
- History of ideas
- History of social movements
- History of the "Third World"
- Memory and historical consciousness
- Critical theory
- Knowledge & practice
OTHER WORK EXPERIENCES
- 2022-2023: interim Executive Secretary, Swiss Malaria Group
- 2018-2020: PR Executive, Farner Consultung
- 2017: Mandatory Swiss civil service at Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme
FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS AND AWARDS
- 2025: SNSF mobility grant CHF 18’200.-
- 2023: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), Doc.CH grant recipient (2023-2026)
- 2022: Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID), recipient of the funding package for the Ph.D.
- 2022: recipient of the Prix Arditi en relations internationals (best master’s dissertation in international studies or international affairs)
AFILIATIONS
Gender Centre