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Alexander Meckelburg is a historical anthropologist. He is research fellow at the Department of History with the ERC-funded project “African Abolitionism: The Rise and Transformations of Anti-Slavery in Africa (AFRAB)”. He carries out research on the history of slavery and abolition in Ethiopia.
His research and fieldwork focuses on Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. His PhD thesis “From “Subject to Citizen”? History, Identity and Minority Citizenship: The Case of the Mao and Komo of western Ethiopia” (defended March 2017 at the University of Hamburg) is a historical ethnography of minority citizenship and intergenerational marginalization of Koman speaking ethnic communities in western Ethiopia.
Previously he was an editorial assistant with the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica and research fellow at the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies at the University of Hamburg (2010-2016). He was a visiting scholar at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Nairobi affiliated to ERC-funded project “SLAFNET: Slavery in Africa Dialogue between Europe and Africa” (2017-19) and Herzog-Ernst Fellow of the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation at the University of Erfurt (2019).
Since 2020 he is a member of the editorial board of the journal Aethiopcia: International Journal for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies (https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/aethiopica/about).
His research interests include the social and political history of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, race, slavery, labor and migration, political culture and citizenship.
Recent Publications
Peer-reviewed journals
- with Nicola Camilleri (2020), “Special Issue: From Subjecthood to Citizenship in the Horn of Africa”, Northeast African Studies, 20, (2020), 1-2
- with Giulia Bonacci, “Introduction: Revisiting Slavery and the Slave Trade in Ethiopia”, Northeast African Studies (Special Issue) 17, 2 (2017/18), 5-30
- with Solomon Gebreyes, “Ethiopia and Great Britain: A Note on the Anti-Slavery Protocol of 1884”, Northeast African Studies 17, 2 (2017/18), 61-82
Book chapters
- “Minority Integration and Citizenship Expansion. Observations from the Mao and Komo groups in Western Ethiopia”, in Susanne Epple (ed.) Artisans, Hunters and Slave Descendants in Ethiopia: Recent Observations on Status Change and Boundary Shifting, Studien zur Kulturkunde, Reimer Verlag: Berlin (2018), 173-192
Edited books
- with Sophia Dege-Müller and Dirk Bustorf (eds), Oral Traditions in Ethiopian Studies. Aethiopica Supplement, 7, Harrassowitz-Verlag: Wiesbaden (2018)
