Mag. phil. Katharina Oke, PhD

Katharina Oke researches global history with a focus on Nigeria and Ghana. She currently focuses on media, communication, artisans and craftspeople, and port cities. She is also currently developing a research project on Black (Austrian) History in global perspective.

She studied journalism at the Vienna University of Applied Sciences and African Studies at the University of Vienna. She then enrolled in the doctoral programme African History/Global History at the University of Oxford. In 2018, she received her PhD with the dissertation “The Politics of the Public Sphere. English-language and Yoruba-language Print Culture in Colonial Lagos, 1880s‒1940s” on newspaper culture in Nigeria.

From 2018-2020, Katharina was a lecturer in Modern African History at King’s College, London and a TORCH Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She is a founding member of the interdisciplinary research network „Colonial Ports and Global History“ (CPAGH) at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

Her current research project studies artisans and craftspeople in Accra (Ghana) and Lagos (Nigeria). It brings together the history of knowledge and economic history, illuminates the broader context and history of entrepreneurial practices and in this way contributes to the global history of capitalism.

Related links:

Current courses

University of Graz research portal (publications, projects)