Team

Bernhard C. Schär, SNSF Eccellenza Professor, Project Leader

Bernhard C. Schär is interested in colonial history, history of science, military history, and the history of masculinities. Since 2006, he has been studying the interdependencies between French- and German-speaking Europe and the Dutch colonial empire in present-day Indonesia. He has been a lecturer at the ETH Zurich and a visiting researcher at the LMU in Munich. Invitations and research visits have taken him to Munich, Berlin, Göttingen, Leiden, Singapore, Colombo and the island of Sulawesi. Bernhard C. Schär has been a journalist and active in the field of history education. He is a regular contributor to the Swiss weekly newspaper WOZ.

Amal Shahid, PhD, postdoctoral researcher

Amal Shahid is a postdoctoral researcher in the Collaborative History project, focusing on the Basel India Mission. She completed a PhD in International History from the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Her doctoral research explored colonial governance of famine relief in the North-Western Provinces of India between c. 1860-1920, with a focus on labour regulation. During her doctoral studies, she obtained more than three years of teaching experience in interdisciplinary courses. Amal also trained in basic quantitative methods during her Masters in Economic History (research) at the LSE. Her research interests are history of imperialism and colonialism, history of labour, and history of political economy.

Fabio Rossinelli, PhD, postdoctoral researcher

Fabio Rossinelli is a doctor in Contemporary History (PhD). From 2013 to 2019, he worked at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) as a research and teaching assistant, where he conducted his doctoral thesis on Switzerland’s involvement in colonial imperialism during the 19th century. He received the Whitehouse Prize for the quality of his work. Since 2020, he continues his activities as a post-doc researcher at the University of Italian Switzerland (USI) on the topic of migration remittances between 1750 and 1950. Two years later, he joined Prof. Bernhard Schaer’s team at UNIL on the project presented here. He also collaborates with other institutions, such as the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva (provenance research) and the Italian Geographical Society in Rome (missionary history).

Izabel Barros, doctoral researcher

Izabel Barros is a historian, decolonial feminist and anti-racist activist in Brazil and Switzerland. She is an SNSF doctoral student in history in the project “Moral and economic entrepreneurship in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. A collaborative history of Global Switzerland, c. 1830-1900” (IEP-UNIL). From 2020 to mid-2022, she was a program officer at the feminist peace organization cfd and a member of the collectives Taoca and Berner Rassismusstammtisch. From 2013 to 2020, she was program officer at the Cooperaxion Foundation and responsible for various projects for the defense and self-determination of indigenous communities and quilombos in Maranhão in Brazil. She is involved in the collectives Taoca, Livingroom and Berner Rassismusstammtisch. In addition, she has accompanied numerous cultural and artistic projects, such as Wie die Geranie nach Bern verschleppt wurde (2020), Black Box Bern (2020-2021) and We Talk. Schweiz ungefiltert (2021).

Léa Boldo, MA, student assistant

Léa Boldo discovered historical sciences during her bachelor at the University of Lausanne. She is now doing her master’s degree in the faculty of political science, where she’s interested in history and international politics in a multidisciplinary and collaborative way.