Samuël Coghe joined the History Department of Ghent University in January 2023, first as Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and from June 2023 as Associate Professor in African and Global History. Since October 2023, he is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Project CATTLEFRONTIERS - (Post)Colonial Cattle Frontiers: Capitalism, Science and Empire in Southern and Central Africa, 1890s-1970s (2023-2028).
Samuël Coghe studied Translation Studies at Mercator Hogeschool Gent (MA, 2000) and History, Political Science and German Linguistics at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Freie Universität Berlin (MA, 2008). He holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence (2014) and worked as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2014-15); University of Gießen (2015-2018) and Freie Universität Berlin (2019-2022). During the academic year 2018-2019 he was Visiting Professor and Interim Chair of African History at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
His works focuses on the history of colonialism in Africa from transimperial and global perspectives and with a particular focus on socio-economic history and the history of science/knowledge. His research has dealt with the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the South Atlantic world and with the transimperial history of Portuguese population politics in Angola in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (with special attention to the history of colonial medicine, demography and anthropology). His current research engages with the history of cattle economies, pastoralist societies and veterinary science in Central and Southern Africa (Madagascar, Congo-Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola) during the colonial and postcolonial period (ca. 1870s-1970s), which he analyses from a global history perspective.
His publications include a monograph published by Cambridge University Press (Portuguese translation by Imprensa de Ciências Sociais); articles in peer-reviewed international journals such as Slavery and Abolition, Social History of Medicine, Journal of Contemporary History, Medical History and Environmental History, and in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History; as well as an edited volume and many book chapters.
Samuël Coghe is on the editorial board of the journals Medical History, Análise Social, Revue d'Histoire Contemporaine de l'Afrique and Commodity Frontiers. He is also a core member of the Commodities of Empire research project.
Since 2024, he is the academic coordinator of the EMGS, an inter-universitary MA in Global Studies funded by Erasmus Mundus, at Ghent University.
