Leonor Faber-Jonker is research assistant of the ‘Connecting in Times of Duress’ research programme.

In 2015 she graduated with honors from the research master Modern History at the University of Utrecht, with her thesis about the practices surrounding 20 skulls of Herero and Nama victims of the genocide in German South-West Africa (1904-1908). Using a material approach, she analyzed how these human remains acquired layers of meaning as trophies, anthropological specimens, and museal objects, collected during the genocide and studied in Berlin in the 1910s, symbols, icons, evidence and ancestral remains. Her thesis was runner-up of the Africa Thesis Award and will be published by the African Studies Centre in Leiden.

Leonor was the scientific curator of an exhibition on the Namibian genocide at the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris (25 November 2016 – 12 March 2017): ‘Le premier génocide du XXe siècle: Herero et Nama dans le Sud-Ouest africain allemand, 1904-1908’. Outside the academic field she has written several publications on underground culture, contemporary art, and literature. In 2016, she presented her first photo exhibition: ‘Afrikanerland’.