Laura Royer

Short presentation

I am a PhD researcher at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University since October 2023.

My PhD dissertation—tentatively titled Scholarly Institutions and the Postcolonial World of Knowledge—examines the ruptures and continuities between colonial and postcolonial knowledge systems and the intellectual communities that sustained them, through a study of the International Congress of Africanists (1962-1991).

Keywords

• History of Knowledge; History of African Studies; Intellectual History; Colonial and Postcolonial History; Global History; African History

Research

My PhD project examines the ruptures and continuities between colonial and postcolonial knowledge systems and the intellectual communities that sustained them, through a study of the International Congress of Africanists. Between 1962 and 1991, the International Congress of Africanists brought together researchers, writers, politicians, journalists, diplomats, and students from Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia in a series of conferences held across the African continent. These gatherings became important spaces in which participants debated, contested, and (re)defined the postcolonial world of knowledge. The cycle of conferences started in Accra at a moment of enthusiasm around the newly achieved independences and the possibility of building an alternative intellectual and social world. It ended with a meeting in Khartoum amid a lack of resources in the early 1990s, at another time of global rupture. By reconstructing the history of this project, my dissertation investigates the relationship between knowledge communities, institution building, and collective life in the postcolonial world.