Since 2025
Assistant Professor, Center for African Studies, University Basel

2024-2025
Postdoc (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions): Global South Studies Centre, University of Cologne

2022-2024
Postdoc (DAAD PRIME); Global South Studies Centre, University of Cologne and Research Fellow at Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick (UK) and the Okavango Research Institute, University of Botswana

2017-2022
Postdoc (SNSF): Centre for African Studies, University of Basel

2018
Associated Researcher, Department of Environmental & Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town

2011-2017
Lecturer and PhD candidate: Department of History, University of Zurich, Switzerland

• Environmental History
• Namibian and Southern African Studies
• Land Issues
• Multi-species Histories
• Environmental Humanities
• History of Conservation
• Border Studies

Conservationists often use ‘historical’ arguments to justify their visions of which groups of human and non-human species should live where and how. Imagined pasts are central to influential concepts and practices of conservation, such as re-wilding, species re-introduction or landscape restoration. These narratives range from vague references to past equilibriums, that need to be saved, to more specific baselines of past distribution of certain species, that need to be restored, to the re-creation of specific past landscapes in new settings. Historians have hardly contributed to these historicized arguments. Following recent calls for conservation humanities, I apply historiographical methods to engage with conservationists’ ideas of past human-wildlife-land interactions and practices in Southern Africa and the European Alps.

PANATURE is based at the Global South Studies Centre of the University of Cologne, in close collaboration with the University of Namibia and other partners in Southern Africa, Switzerland and Austria.

Funding: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship

Duration: 2024-2026

The project investigates where the wealthy are retreating from the consequences of the climate crisis. Far-reaching environmental changes caused by climate change are leading to land degradation. Some areas are becoming increasingly uninhabitable. At the same time, the elite are creating exclusive escapes for themselves, from private islands and wildlife sanctuaries to virtual worlds. Lenggenhager and his team at the Centre for African Studies are analysing the colonial historical and racial-ideological origins of such escapes. The researchers want to explore the significance of such places for social inequality and the political consequences of climate change.

Funding: SNSF Starting Grant

Duration: 2025-2030

Space in Time was an interdisciplinary joint research project between the University of Cape Town, the University of Namibia and University of Basel, bringing together scholars from geography, history, and environmental science. The project’s geographical focus is the lower !Garib (Orange River) in the South African/Namibian border region, the historical Namaqualand. The area is currently experiencing a new chapter in a long and complex history of changing land use and resource management.
Increasing global economic integration as well as apartheid-motivated delimitations of commercial farms and labour reserve economies have most prominently influenced land use and the social organisation of society in the region. Currently, large-scale agriculture and nature conservation projects dominate land use in this post-apartheid cross-border region. These large-scale projects are contested by those who claim their own rights to land and land use, among them formerly disadvantaged and often very poor communities living along the river. Given its diverse history and the often conflictual articulation of multiple land claims, the region provided an ideal starting point for an analysis of different narratives around land use and management. Placing these narratives in a broader historical and socio-political perspective furthermore allowed for a more balanced discussion of land use that aims to transcend some of the antagonisms between the various stake holders, local, national and international ones.
 

Swiss-South Africa Joint Research Project SNSF

Duration; 2017-2022

The project “Learning for (Ex)Change” develops and implements innovative forms of international collaboration in teaching among universities from Switzerland and Namibia. Over a period of four years (2019-2022), two excursions will take place each summer – one in Namibia and one in Switzerland. The first Winter / Summer School took place in 2019 in Oranjemund, Namibia and in the Appenzellerland in Switzerland, under the title „Structural Change in Semi-Urban Regions in Namibia and Switzerland“. The second edition took place in early 2022 under the topic „Rural Development“ in the Beverin Nature Park (Graubünden, Switzerland) and in Mariental in Southern Namibia. The third edition under the topic „Migrant Labour“ took place in June/July 2022.

Supported by Stiftung Mercator Schweiz and Greenleaves Foundation

Duration: 2019-2022

My dissertation illustrates how the escalating militarization and internationalization of political conflicts in the Caprivi Strip (today Zambezi and Kawango-East Region in north-eastern Namibia) became increasingly interwoven with projects of nature conservation and ecology as well as with narratives of economic development from the 1950s onwards. It was published in 2018.

PhD Project at the University of Zurich

2011-2017

My project deploys a multi-species, more-than-human environmental history approach to investigate how changing (post-)colonial borders interact and redefine species boundaries, conviviality and hierarchies. To do so, I examine historical cross-border movements of two specific species – elephants and tsetse flies – and how governments, conservation organizations and local people produced knowledge of and established control over such cross-border animal movements. The project’s focus is on border regions of Southern Africa in the 20th century. In the centre of the research are two species , that both have been of central concern to colonial and postcolonial governments throughout the 20th century: the elephant, one of the flagship animals of Southern African wildlife conservation, and the tsetse fly, a species that transmit human and animal diseases. The project follows two core fields of investigation: It retraces historical cross-border movements of animals and it investigates how the control of borders and cross-border movements of human and non-human animals was interlinked with the establishment and definition of hierarchies of and between different species – from pests and vermin to royal game and charismatic animals.

For his DAAD project am based at the Global South Studies Centre (GSSC) of the University of Cologne and will spend several months at the Global History and Culture Centre (GHCC) at University of Warwick and the Okavango Research Institute (ORI) of the University of Botswana.

Funding: DAAD PRIME Project

Duration: 2022-2024