Melanie Boehi
Main profile
Melanie Boehi is a historian interested in multispecies history, plants, gardens, museums, the formation of archives, and journalism. She is currently a visiting postdoctoral researcher at WISER and an Early Postdoc.Mobility fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation. She has a PhD degree in history from the University of Basel and an MA degree in history from the University of the Western Cape. Her PhD dissertation, “A South African social garden”, is a study of how the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town evolved as embedded in political processes. She is currently working on a postdoctoral research project concerned with the biography, work and archive of journalist and writer Ruth Weiss. She has published several articles on the history of botany and floriography in Southern Africa, and co-edited the book The Politics of Nature and Science in Southern Africa (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien 2016). She has established Nowseum, a museum of now, as an experimental platform for interdisciplinary public history projects.