Dörte Lerp is PI of the research project “The industry of the world’s optimists.” Tourism as a development strategy in Eastern Africa (1950s-early 1990s). The project is part of the Priority Programme 1859 – Experience & Expectation: Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour funded by the German Research Council. Dörte Lerp joined Free University Berlin in March 2020 after working as an assistant professor, research associate and lecturer at the University of Cologne and as a research associate and lecturer at Rostock University.

Her research interests include tourism and development history, German and European colonial history as well as postcolonial memorial culture. Her current project investigates how tourism shaped European-African economic and socio-political relations in the second half of the twentieth century. In her first monograph, published in 2016, she investigated late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial policies in German Southwest Africa and the eastern Prussian provinces.

Dörte Lerp has been a visiting fellow at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and undertaken research in Kenya and Namibia. Her work has been supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (student bursary), the post-graduate program “Transnational Spaces” at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) and the German Academic Exchange Service. She holds a PhD in History from Rostock University and a Magister degree in History, Political Science and Sociology from Free University Berlin.

University of Cologne:

(K)ein Platz für Tiere? Geschichte der Tierschutzbewegung in Deutschland (BA seminar and tutorial, 2018)

Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe? Die Geschichte der Entwicklungshilfe (BA seminar and tutorial, 2017-2018)

Frauen in den deutschen Kolonien (BA seminar and tutorial, 2016-2017)

Queere Stadtgeschichte(n) (BA seminar and exercise, 2016-2017)

Zwischen Emanzipation und Eugenik – Die Sexualreformbewegung in der Weimarer Republik (BA seminar and tutorial, 2016)

Auswanderungs- oder Einwanderungsland? Migration aus, in und nach Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert (BA seminar and tutorial, 2015-2016)

Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (BA seminar and tutorial, 2015)

Tourismusgeschichte (BA seminar and tutorial, 2014-2015)

Blaustrümpfe und Suffragetten - Die erste Welle der Frauenbewegung (BA seminar and tutorial, 2014)

Die Berliner Afrikakonferenz. Kolonialpolitik im Zeitalter des Hochimperialismus (BA seminar and tutorial, 2013-2014)

Rostock University:

Mecklenburg postkolonial (BA seminar and exercise, 2013)

Transnationale Geschichte. Ansätze, Methoden, Themen (BA exercise, 2012)

Main Research Interests:

Tourism and Development, German and European colonial and imperial History, Gender and Colonialism, Transnational and Global History, Postcolonial Memorial Culture

Current Research Project:

“The industry of the world’s optimists.” Tourism as a development strategy in Eastern Africa (1950s-early 1990s) (funded by the German Research Council as part of the DFG Priority Programme 1859 – Experience & Expectation: Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour)

When newly independent states in Africa decided to pursue tourism as a development strategy in the early 1960s, the economic success of this policy was not self-evident. Nevertheless, optimism ran high. Tourism was expected to increase the foreign exchange earnings of host countries, contribute substantially to their gross national product, form a new source of income for the state and create jobs. To those who invested in projects in the Global South tourism promised stable returns and market advantages. While the economic crisis as well as social and environmental impacts diminished this optimism temporarily, most governments and financiers did not discard tourism as a development strategy, but continued to advocate for it. However, they did adapt their expectations according to changing notions of development.

Looking at the example of wildlife tourism in two East African countries, Kenya and Tanzania, the project aims to investigate what fueled this economic optimism. How did postcolonial governments, financial institutions and private investors come to believe in the success of tourism as development strategy? And how did they adapt their expectations in the face of the economic crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s, that brought with it not only a decrease in tourist arrivals but weakened the belief in rapid economic growth and challenged it as the sole indicator for development? Presuming that the actors involved did not form their expectations independently the project specifically concentrates on the social context and networks that shaped the belief in tourism as development strategy. It investigates the extent to which historical processes like decolonization, block confrontation and globalization influenced the actors’ preferences, identities and social norms. It analyses the role and function of expert networks and international organizations within the process of expectation formation. And it examines whose visions of the future eventually “succeeded” in guiding development policies and whose did not.

Monographs:

Imperiale Grenzräume. Bevölkerungspolitiken in Deutsch-Südwestafrika und den östlichen Provinzen Preußens 1884-1914, Frankfurt a.M: Campus 2016.

Edited Books:

with Ulrike Lindner (eds.), New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire. Comparative and Global Approaches, London: Bloomsbury 2018.

with Melanie Hühn, Knut Petzold and Miriam Stock (eds.), Transnationalität, Transkulturalität, Translokalität, Transstaatlichkeit. Theoretische und empirische Begriffsbestimmungen, Berlin et al.: Lit 2010.

Peer Reviewed Articles:

Tourismus in Ostafrika zwischen Entwicklungshoffnungen und Konsumkritik, in: Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 69 (2018) 3/4, 154-168.

“Beyond the Prairie. Adopting, Adapting and Transforming Settlement Policies within the German Empire,” in: Journal of Modern European History 14 (2016) 2, 225-244.

Farmers to the Frontier. Settler Colonialism in the Eastern Prussian Provinces and German Southwest Africa, in: Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44 (2013), 567-583.

Book Chapters:

with Susann Lewerenz: Getrennte Geschichten. Der Kolonialismus im Deutschen Historischen Museum, in: Wolfgang Geiger und Henning Melber (ed.), Kritik des deutschen Kolonialismus. Postkoloniale Sicht auf Erinnerung und Geschichtsvermittlung, Frankfurt a.M.: Brandes und Apsel 2021, 155-162.

„Ruling Classes“ and „Serving Races.“ German imperial policies on land, labor, and migration in trans-imperial perspective, in: Janne Lathi (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World: Entangled Empires, Palgrave 2021, 129-151.

with Ulrike Lindner, Introduction. Gendered Imperial Formations, in: Ulrike Lindner and Dörte Lerp (eds.), New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire. Comparative and Global Approaches, London: Bloomsbury 2018, 1-27.

Between Intimacy and Exclusion. The Colonial Gender Order, in: Deutsches Historisches Museum (ed.), German Colonialism. Fragments Past and Present, Darmstadt: Theiss 2016, 58-65.

with Susann Lewerenz, Museen hacken, oder: Das “revolutionäre Potential der Partizipation,” in: AutorInnenkollektiv Loukanikos (ed.), History is unwritten. Linke Geschichtspolitik und kritische Wissenschaft. Ein Lesebuch, Münster: Edition Assemblage 2015, 252-267.

Das Kaiserreich nationalisiert? Grenzziehungen und Kontrollsysteme in den östlichen Provinzen Preußens, in: Hühn et al. (eds.), Transnationalität, Transkulturalität, Translokalität, Transstaatlichkeit. Theoretische und empirische Begriffsbestimmungen, Berlin et al.: Lit 2010, 95-111.

with Melanie Hühn, Knut Petzold and Miriam Stock, In neuen Dimensionen denken? Einführende Überlegungen zu Transkulturalität, Transnationalität, Transstaatlichkeit und Translokalität, in: Melanie Hühn et al. (eds.), Transnationalität, Transkulturalität, Translokalität, Transstaatlichkeit. Theoretische und empirische Begriffsbestimmungen, Berlin et al.: Lit 2010, 11-46.

Zwischen Bevölkerungspolitik und Frauenbildung. Die Kolonialfrauenschulen in Witzenhausen und Bad Weilbach, in: Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Mechtild Leutner (eds.), Frauen in den deutschen Kolonien, Berlin: Ch. Links 2009, 32-39.

Online Publications:

with Manuela Bauche, Susann Lewerenz, Marie Muschalek and Kristin Weber, Kolonialismus im Kasten. Erinnern und Vergessen im DHM, www.publikative.org [2013].

with Manuela Bauche, Susann Lewerenz, Marie Muschalek und Kristin Weber, Versteckt und verharmlost. Kolonialgeschichte im Deutschen Historischen Museum Berlin, www.berlin-postkolonial.de [2012].

Book Reviews:

Review: Quinn Slobodian, Globalisten – Das Ende der Imperien und die Geburt des Neoliberalismus, in: Arbeit – Bewegung – Geschichte (2021) 1, 227-229.

Review: Karsten Linne, Von Witzenhausen in die Welt. Ausbildung und Arbeit von Tropenlandwirten 1898-1971, in: Historische Anthropologie 26 (2019) 3, 429-432.

Review: Larissa Förster, Postkoloniale Erinnerungslandschaften. Wie Deutsche und Herero in Namibia des Kriegs von 1904 gedenken, Frankfurt/M.: Campus 2010, in: sehepunkte 10 (2010) 11.

Other Publications:

with Manuela Bauche, Susann Lewerenz, Marie Muschalek and Kristin Weber, Kolonialismus im Kasten. Unabhängiger Audio-Guide zu der Dauerausstellung des Deutschen Historischen Museums, 2013, URL: www.kolonialismusimkasten.de.

Cornelius Fredericks, short biography for the touring exhibition "freedom roads! koloniale Straßennamen | postkoloniale Erinnerungskultur," opening exhibition, Berlin August-October 2010.