ABOUT

I have been researching the history of Europe and colonial Africa in a transnational and transimperial perspective, with a focus on education, childhood and science.

I studied at the University of Geneva, the Ecole Normale Supérieure (as Pensionnaire étranger) and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. After receiving my PhD in history from the University of Geneva and the EHESS, I have held visiting positions in the Universities of Heidelberg, Paris 1, Sciences Po Paris and Oxford. Between 2016 and 2019, I was a SNF Ambizione Fellow at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne, as well as the co-Director of the Centre of International History and Political Studies of Globalization (2017-2019). In 2015-2016 and 2019-2021, I was a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Department of History of the University of Geneva. Since 2021, I hold a permanent position as Senior Research Associate and Lecturer at the Archives Institut Jean Jacques Rousseau, a research unit of the University of Geneva. I am also a member of the Scientific Council of the Maison de l’Histoire, as well as of the editorial boards of Histoire de l’éducation and the International Review of Sociology.

My first book – L’école républicaine et l’étranger (2015) – explores the wide range of transnational circulations and exchanges that shaped French school reforms in the second half of the 19th century. This research has been awarded the Louis Cros Prize in 2013 and the ISCHE First Book Award in 2017.

I am currently working on three research projects. The first one focuses on colonial education and aims to provide a connected history of imperial and international development policies in French Africa (1945-1961). A new monograph, tentatively entitled Internationaliser l’éducation en Afrique coloniale. La France, l’Unesco et la crise des empires (1945-1961), is forthcoming in February 2023. The second project explores the history of scientific cooperation in colonial Africa (1920s-1960s). It highlights how inter-imperial institutions – such as the Scientific Council for Africa and the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara – shaped new research practices and discourses in an age of imperial crisis, especially in the fields of human/natural sciences and locust control. The third project aims at decentering the “sciences of childhood” by examining the construction and circulation of scientific knowledge between Swizerland and countries of the Global South (Brazil, Cameroon, Turkey, Vietnam) in the first half of the 20^th century.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2803-8401

Get in touch: damianomatasci@gmail.com