Dr. Sarah Ehlers

Sarah Ehlers is postdoctoral researcher at the DFG Research Group 2448 “Practicing Evidence—Evidencing Practice”. In her research project “Evidence Regimes of Local and International Pesticide Use,” sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and located at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, she explores the controversies and negotiation processes of pest control in the Global South from the 1960s to 1980s. She is a historian specializing in global history and the history of modern biomedicine. Her work focuses on infectious disease control in colonial and decolonizing Africa, on medical humanitarianism, on questions of entangled and transnational history, and of environmental history. She was a research associate at Munich Center for Technology in Society from 2017–2020. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them a DAAD fellowship at the University of California Los Angeles and at the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, Philadelphia, USA. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2016 with a doctoral dissertation on colonial sleeping sickness campaigns, European identities, and modern medicine.

Selected Publications:

• with Stefan Esselborn, eds. Evidence in Action Between Science and Society: Constructing, Validating and Contesting Knowledge. Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. New York: Routledge, 2022.
• "Disease Control and Human Experimentation: Networks, Practices, and Biographical Pathways from Colonial Medicinde to Nazi Germany." In Colonial Paradigms of Violence: Comparative Analysis of the Holocaust,
  Genocide, and Mass Killing, edited by Michelle Gordon and Rachel O'Sullivan, 83–114. European Holocaust Studies 4. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2022.
• "Welche Therapie für wen? Globale Krankheiten und ihr kolonialer Schatten." In Geschichte der Gegenwart, edited by Christine Lötscher, Gesine Krüger, Gleb Albert, Janosch Steuwer, Philipp Sarasin, Sandro Zanetti, Svenja Goltermann, and Sylvia Sasse, March 10, 2021. https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/welche-therapie-fuer-wen-globale-krankheiten-und-ihr-kolonialer-schatten.
• with Sarah Frenking, Sarah Kleinmann, Nina Régis, and Verena Triesethau, eds. Begrenzungen, Überschreitungen. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Grenzen und Körper – Limiter, franchir: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Grenzen und Körper – Approches interdisciplinaires sur les frontières et les corps. Deutschland und Frankreich im wissenschaftlichen Dialog / Le dialogue scientifique franco-allemand 11. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021.
• Europa und die Schlafkrankheit: Koloniale Seuchenbekämpfung, europäische Identitäten und moderne Medizin 1890–1950. Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2019.
• 2016. “Medical Missions and Racial Visions. Fighting Sleeping Sickness in Colonial Africa in the Early Twentieth Century.” In Health and Difference: Rendering Human Variation in Colonial Engagements, edited by Veronika Lipphardt and Alexandra Widmer, 89–110. Oxford: Berghahn.