Lars Dickmann
Associated Researcher
Lars Dickmann is an associate researcher at the Institute for European Global Studies in Basel. He was previously a lecturer and assistant at the Department of History at the University of Basel. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Research Training Group "Ambivalent Enmity. Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East" at the University of Heidelberg and the Heidelberg School of Jewish Studies. In his dissertation project "Swiss Entomologists in the Dutch East Indies", he uses a biographical approach to examine the role of Swiss entomologists who worked in the Dutch East Indies, later in Indonesia, as museologists, civil servants and private entrepreneurs in entomological control and later took up similar positions in Switzerland. It is a case study of various Basel institutions with a proxy-imperial character that dealt with "tropical sciences" in different ways. The second focus of the project is to analyze conflicts between scientific institutions that were involved in debates about different methods, e.g. chemical or biological, to control insects in "tropical" colonies.