Dr Norman Aselmeyer
Pat Thompson DAAD Fellow and Tutor in Modern History
Wadham College
I am a historian of European colonialism and modern Africa, with a particular focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My research engages with urban and social history, the history of infrastructure, and the dynamics of popular protest. I completed my doctorate at the European University Institute in Florence in 2022 with a dissertation entitled The Shadow Line: Railway and Society in Colonial East Africa, c. 1890–1914. Before coming to Oxford, I taught at the University of Bremen and the Freie Universität Berlin, and held a Junior Research Fellowship at the University College London and the German Historical Institute London. At Oxford, I teach across modern European, African, and global history since c. 1800, and offer classes on Approaches and Disciplines of History. I also welcome supervision requests in modern African and colonial history.
Research Interests
- German and British colonialism
- Modern Africa
- Decolonization and anti-colonialism
- History of the Maasai
- Global urban history
- Legacies and memories of colonialism
My work explores the social and cultural history of colonialism, with a particular focus on British rule in East Africa and German colonialism in global perspective. I am interested in how infrastructures (such as railways) and cities shaped everyday life under empire, how people navigated systems of domination, and how these histories continue to reverberate into the present.
Alongside this, I study migration and diasporic experiences, especially the lives of Africans in Europe. This strand of my research opens onto broader questions of memory and reckoning: how colonialism has been remembered, silenced, or contested in different societies. Divided Germany provides a striking case, where East and West Germany positioned themselves in different ways toward colonialism, anti-colonial struggles, and their own imperial legacies.
Another strand of my research examines Maasai history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus on how Maasai communities navigated colonial and postcolonial state power—at times through acts of resistance, at others through accommodation or refusal; by taking part in development campaigns or deliberately abstaining from them; by engaging in the First World War or remaining apart from it.
See my personal website: normanaselmeyer.com
