Stefanie Bognitz (PhD) is a social anthropologist. Her regional expertise, professional experience and theoretical concern cover aspects of legal, political, applied, public and critical anthropology spanning contexts in South Africa, Rwanda including the Great Lakes region of Africa and more recently Ghana and Germany. She was a fellow at the International Max Planck Research School on Retaliation, Mediation and Punishment at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (2011-14), and a research fellow at the Graduate School Society and Culture in Motion at the University of Halle (2010, 2016/17). Between 2018 and 2020, she held teaching and assistant professorships in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Halle, and later taught at the University of Art and Design Halle (2020). From 2010 to 2018, she was an active member of the interdisciplinary research network Law, Organization, Science and Technology. As an applied anthropologist, she worked as policy advisor, legal expert and consultant in Rwanda and Germany. In 2022, Dr. Bognitz was awarded a Writing Fellowship at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), where she began her current book project, Anton Wilhelm Amo In-Between Lifeworlds. This work brings together anthropological, philosophical, and archival research across Ghana, South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain. As a senior research fellow at JIAS (2022–24), she advanced this transcontinental study, which she will complete during her fellowship at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) in 2025/26.
MIASA Project: Anton Wilhelm Amo In-between Lifeworlds
Despite growing interest, scholarship on Anton Wilhelm Amo, the first and only philosopher in early Enlightenment Europe born on the continent of Africa, remains limited, grounded in a handful of archival sources that focus primarily on his philosophical credentials. Far less attention has been paid to the remarkable fact of his presence: a thinker of African descent navigating and shaping European intellectual life in the 18th century, a figure unmatched in German and European academia since 1700.
Existing studies often isolate Amo from his historical and intellectual context, obscuring the network of interlocutors, mentors, and traditions that informed his life and critical thoughts. Equally neglected are the abolitionist and emancipatory strands of African American philosophy that later critiqued Enlightenment reason for its silence on the Middle Passage and the transatlantic human trade, critiques that implicitly call for a more critical reckoning with Africa’s place in global knowledge.
This book project seeks to re-anchor Amo’s thought by returning to the worlds that shaped his life and critical thoughts. It combines archival research with anthropological inquiry in Axim and Shama in today’s Ghana, following his movements between Africa and Europe to illuminate his intellectual life. In doing so, it proposes new ways of un/knowing Amo, recovering lost biographies, forgotten conversations, and the possibility of memory beyond the margins of Enlightenment history.
Selected publications
Moradi, Fazil and Stefanie Bognitz (eds.) Forthcoming 2026. Unsettling the Political Lives of Skin Colour. Wits University Press.
Bognitz, Stefanie Forthcoming 2026. Skin Colour, Body, Mind and Thought in Decolonial Encounters with Anton Wilhelm Amo. In: Moradi, Fazil and Stefanie Bognitz (eds.). Unsettling the Political Lives of Skin Colour. Wits University Press.
Bognitz, Stefanie Forthcoming 2025. The Giving and Taking of Liveable Lives: Women, Violence and Land in Rwanda. Gender and Justice.
Bognitz, Stefanie and Alice Urusaro Karekezi. Forthcoming 2025. Forging a Common Humanity: The Last 30 Years since the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. In: Green, Linda, Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Mass Violence. London and New York: Routledge.
Fazil Moradi and Stefanie Bognitz (eds.) 2024. Special Issue: Spectres of Anton Wilhelm Amo. Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies 4 (1): 14-86.
Moradi, Fazil und Stefanie Bognitz 2024. Introduction: Spectres of Anton Wilhelm Amo, the enlightenment philosopher. Special Issue: Spectres of Anton Wilhelm Amo, guest-edited by Fazil Moradi and Stefanie Bognitz. Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies 4(1): 14-19.
Bognitz, Stefanie 2024a. Anton Wilhelm Amo: Signposts of a Precarious Biography. Special Issue: Spectres of Anton Wilhelm Amo, guest-edited by Fazil Moradi and Stefanie Bognitz. Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies 4 (1): 55-64.
Bognitz, Stefanie 2024b. Anton Wilhelm Amo: A Biography In-Between Worlds. Special Issue: Spectres of Anton Wilhelm Amo, guest-edited by Fazil Moradi and Stefanie Bognitz. Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies 4 (1): 65-76.
Bognitz, Stefanie 2023. Dispute as Critique: Moving beyond ‘post-genocide Rwanda’. Special Issue: In Search of Decolonized Political Futures: Engaging Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native. Anthropological Theory 23 (4): 386–403.
