Dr. Sarah Marjie

Dr. Sarah Marjie chose the University of Bayreuth for its internationally recognized position in African Studies and its interdisciplinary research culture. As a member of the Cluster Project Colonial Letters and the Contact of Knowledges, she was particularly interested in the opportunity to deepen her engagement with the project through direct collaboration with colleagues at the Institute of African Studies (IAS).

The university’s infrastructure, including the Open Creative Labs, and its strong network of academics conducting research in diverse areas, provided an ideal environment for both focused research and academic exchange. Her opportunity to conduct further research there aligned well with her ongoing work on colonial correspondence in British Southern Cameroons and Ghana. During her stay, she also encountered information regarding correspondence between Kenya and British colonialists.

During her three-week stay, she undertook the following activities:

• Corpus Development: She worked on compiling the colonial correspondence from Ghana that she had previously collected. These materials are now being integrated into the Corpus of Colonial Epistolary Correspondence, enriching its scope and enabling comparative analysis.
• Comparative Work: She is conducting a preliminary comparative study of identity markers in letters from Ghana and British Southern Cameroons, focusing on expressions of loyalty, resistance, and self-representation. The writing is still a work in progress.
• Collaborative Networking and Engagements: She met with several scholars and participated in informal discussions and networking sessions at the Open Creative Labs. Together, they explored intersections between their work and identified possible avenues for future collaboration. These meetings facilitated interdisciplinary exchange and created a conducive space for future research.
• Contribution to Edited Volume: She is finalizing the last draft of her chapter for the forthcoming edited volume Contact and Conflict of Knowledges in Colonial Correspondences: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (edited by Eric A. Anchimbe and Glory Essien Otung). Her chapter draws on insights gained during her stay and incorporates new archival findings.

The Ghanaian materials Dr. Sarah Marjie processed have increased the corpus’s regional diversity and thematic depth, particularly in the areas of land disputes and missionary interactions. She has submitted a draft chapter entitled Insidious Paternalism and the Establishment of Cultural Heritage: A Contrapuntal Analysis of Colonial Correspondences of the British Southern Cameroons for the above-mentioned volume.

Her research stay has significantly enriched her academic work by:

• Providing access to a collaborative and interdisciplinary research environment.
• Enabling her to integrate new primary sources into a growing corpus.
• Strengthening her methodological approach to comparative epistolary analysis.
• Opening possibilities for joint publication: She is currently in discussions with a Bayreuth colleague about co-authoring a comparative article on Swahili and Anglophone colonial correspondences.

Dr. Marjie stay at the University of Bayreuth has been both productive and inspiring. She expresses gratitude to the IAS Steering Committee and to the Cluster and IAS members she met for their support and collegiality. The research outcomes and collaborative relationships developed during this visit will continue to shape her academic trajectory.