Agnes Piekacz

Agnes Piekacz is a postdoctoral researcher and junior fellow in the IFG 12 „Cash in Crisis Times: A West African Investigation“ at MIASA. She studied sociology and history at Bielefeld University where she completed her PhD in 2023 with a dissertation on the British-South African second-hand clothing trade during the late 19th and early 20th. Prior to her fellowship at MIASA, Agnes Piekacz held research associate positions at Bielefeld University and received fellowships/scholarships by the German Academic Exchange Service, the German Historical Institute London, and the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz. Her research focuses on cultural economic history and global connections of Western Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries with an emphasis on Western European-African entanglements. She is currently conceptualizing her second research project on the history of cross-border money transfers during the 20th century.

Her sub-project within IFG 12 focuses the role of post offices and money orders in cross-border money transfers in colonial and post-independent Ghana. It traces the changing relationship and between postal services and banking, politics, and late 20th-century financial service providers as well as modes and circumventions of and attitudes towards the (de)materialization of moving monies.