Felix Schürmann is a historian specialising in modern Africa and its global entanglements, the maritime world, and early film. Since 2018 he is a project leader at the University of Erfurt for a research association that investigates how the cartography of the oceans facilitated globalisation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Besides he is working on a monograph about the history of Rubondo Island (Tanzania), which has been transformed into Africa’s first conservation island during the postcolonial transition in the 1960s and 1970s. In is PhD thesis (Goethe University Frankfurt, 2014) he investigated encounters and relations between littoral societies on the east and west coasts of Africa and whaling crews from North America and Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Further research interests include the history of islands and processes of islanding in the global tropical belt and the significance of waterbodies in the modern history of Africa.
