Dr Agnes M. Piekacz

Agnes Piekacz is a cultural historian of the economic with a particular interest in African European entanglements in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

I received my PhD in History from Bielefeld University in 2023 with a dissertation on the British-South African trade in second-hand military clothing between c.1870 and 1910. The study explores the emergence of the trade as a process of continuous negotiation and contested commoditization. My research was funded by the GHIL, the German Academic Exchange Service, and a fellowship by Leibniz-Institute for European History. Prior to joining the GHIL as a Research Fellow in Colonial and Global History in May 2026, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Bielefeld University and a Junior Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Research Group (IFG) 12 at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in in Africa (MIASA), Accra.