Bernhard Gissibl is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Leibniz-Institute of European History in Mainz. Before coming to Mainz, he taught at LMU Munich, Jacobs University, and the University of Mannheim, where he earned his PhD in 2009. His research areas are the history of nature and wildlife conservation in a transnational and global perspective, and the environmental history of German colonialism. He investigates how concepts and ideas of conservation traveled across borders to become implemented in differing social, political, and ecological contexts. His forthcoming book, The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa, analyzes the origins and political ecology of Tanzania’s wildlife conservation complex as it emerged in the decades of German colonial rule, prior to the First World War. At the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, he is preparing this book for publication.
Selected Publications:
- Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective. Berghahn Books: Oxford/New York, 2012. Edited with Sabine Höhler and Patrick Kupper.
- “A Bavarian Serengeti: Space, Race and Time in the Entangled History of Nature Conservation in East Africa and Germany.” In Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, 102–19. Berghahn Books: Oxford/New York, 2012.
- “Die Mythen der Serengeti: Naturbilder, Naturpolitik und die Ambivalenz westlicher Um-Weltbürgerschaft in Ostafrika.” Denkanstöße, Schriftenreihe der Stiftung Natur und Umwelt Rheinland-Pfalz, 10 (2013): 48–75 .
- “Forum: The Nature of German Environmental History,” German History 27, no. 1 (2009), 113–30.With Thomas Lekan, Dorothee Brantz, Paul Warde, Verena Winiwarter, and Thomas Zeller.
- "German Colonialism and the Beginnings of International Wildlife Preservation in Africa.” GHI Washington Bulletin Supplement 3 (2006), 121–43.