Anna-Sophie Springer
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Anna-Sophie Springer's PhD research project
The Nature of Investment: Natural History, Forests, and Finance in the Malay Archipelago Since 1835
This research investigates the changing modes of investment in tropical nature arguing that zoological and botanical scientific objects offer an under-examined archive for tracing the complex geopolitical legacies of environmental and colonial violence and their attendant visual economies.
Bird of Paradise feather, A. R. Wallace Collection 1860
It links colonial practices of “collecting” to current strategies for “banking” nature. I also trace practices of forest modification from the invention of Prussian forestry to the ongoing monocultural plantations of oil palm in Indonesia.
Through an analysis of colonial scientific practices in Nusantara—specimen collecting and forest modification—the thesis project provides the historical basis against which Anna-Sophie goes on to investigate contemporary modes of investing in nature through “species banking” and “forest financialisation".
Chase-AHRC Studentship.
Anna-Sophie is a member of Roundtable four.