Keynote Speakers
Alexander Keese
Université de Genève
Full professor of Sub-Saharan African history since 2019. He joined the University of Geneva as an SNSF scholarship professor in 2015, after leading the ForcedLabourAfrica research group (ERC Starting Grant) at the Centro de Estudos Africanos da Universidade do Porto in Portugal (2010–2011) and then at Humboldt University in Berlin (2011–2015). He defended his doctoral thesis in modern and contemporary history in 2004 at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau and his habilitation thesis in 2010 at the University of Bern. Alexander Keese was a visiting researcher at the Centre of European and International Studies and Research (CEISR) at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom and a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). A specialist in the comparative history of decolonisation in West and Central Africa, the history of forced labour and ethnic mobilisation in the context of conflict, he is also interested in several global issues, including a global history of forced labour and a comparative perspective on plantation systems (African and non-African; he has conducted research in Suriname and Brazil, where he has several research collaborations).
Cecilia L. Chu
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Cecilia L. Chu is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Trained as an urban historian with a background in design and conservation, her work focuses on the intersection of professional and popular knowledge of architecture and the built environment. She is the author of Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City, which received the 2023 Best Book Award from the Urban History Association and the 2024 International Planning History Society Book Prize. Chu is a co-founder and past president of DOCOMOMO Hong Kong and an editorial board member of the Journal of Urban History, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong, Surveying and Environment, and Built Environment. She received her PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.