Book launch and discussion: Transnational Histories of Rural Reform, 1900−1950

Book launch and discussion, with authors Julia Tischler and Amalia Ribi Forclaz, and Juri Auderset as commentator

Cultivating Race - Transatlantic Agricultural Reform in South Africa, c. 1900–1950
Julia Tischler is Associate Professor of African History at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She obtained her PhD in History at the University of Cologne, Germany, in 2012. After her postdoctoral research at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, she joined the University of Basel in 2015. Her research focuses on histories of the environment, development, and racism in Southern Africa. Her recent book, Cultivating Race (OUP 2025), examines agricultural progressivism in segregationist South Africa as a transnational movement.

Cultivating Fields of Progress - Agriculture and the International Labour Organization, 1920s–1950s
Amalia Ribi Forclaz is Full Professor in International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She holds a DPhil in Modern history from the University of Oxford (Lincoln College, 2008). Her current research interests focus on the history of agriculture, labour, development, international institutions, and the environment. Her recent book Cultivating Fields of Progress (OUP 2025) explores how the improvement of working and living conditions in agriculture became an international issue in the broader context of the interwar and immediate post Second World War years.

Juri Auderset is Lecturer for the History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries at the Institute of History at the University of Bern and research fellow at the Archives of Rural History in Bern. Among his research and teaching interests are the history of agriculture and environment, labor history and the history of capitalism, conceptual and intellectual history.