Biography

Andrea Rosengarten is a doctoral candidate in the History Department and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow in 2021-22. 

Her dissertation is titled: “Remapping Namaqualand: Negotiating Ethnicity and Territoriality in a Southern African Borderland, 18th-21st centuries.” The project explores the fraught production of African ethnic boundary ideas and territorial claim-making in the arid region historically called "Namaqualand", which today sits on either side of the South African and Namibian border. Andrea’s research has been funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship in 2019-2020, and a CLIR-Mellon Dissertation Research in Original Sources Fellowship in 2018-2019. The work is based on 20 months of archival and oral history research in Namibia, South Africa, Germany and the UK.

In 2020-21 Andrea was the History Teaching Initiative Fellow at Northwestern's Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. She has also taught history research methodology at the University of Namibia in Windhoek, and is a core member of the collaborative and interdisciplinary research project “Space in Time: Landscape narratives and land management changes in a Southern African cross-border region.” Space in Time focuses on histories and ecologies of the lower Orange/!Garib River region in Namibia and South Africa, and brings together affiliates of the University of Namibia, University of Basel, and University of Cape Town.

Prior to Northwestern, Andrea was awarded the Richard Hofstadter Dissertation Prize for best master’s thesis in her graduating cohort of the Columbia University & London School of Economics dual degree program in International and World History (2014). Her M.A.-M.Sc. thesis examined the emergence of the “Coloured” racial segregation category in Namibia during the first two decades of South African colonial rule, ca. 1915-1935.

Originally from New York City, Andrea holds a B.A. from Columbia University in German Studies and Art History (2012, magna cum laude).