Jannik Keindorf

After studying at Ruhr-University Bochum, Jannik Keindorf worked at the University of Duisburg-Essen and, since 2023, at the University of Tübingen as a member of the ERC project Atlantic Exiles. His dissertation project, titled A Colonial Refugee Regime: Refuge, Belonging, and Empire in Jamaica during the Age of Revolutions, c. 1780-1820, examines negotiations of refuge and belonging around the arrival of political refugees from revolution in British Jamaica. It aims to show how the accommodation of these refugees took place within a counterrevolutionary framework: on the one hand in the form of a language of deservingness through which ‘refugees’ were primarily conceived of as victims of revolutionary change, and on the other hand in tandem with the expansion of colonial systems of registration and securitisation against revolutionary contagion. The result was a distinctly colonial refugee regime underpinned by local conceptions of belonging that were mainly informed by race as a marker of societal stratification.
In a second step, the dissertation examines the reverberations of these local practices of accommodation in the wider imperial context by recasting Jamaica as a hub of counterrevolutionary exile politics, and refugees as key figures in discourses over the nature of the relationship between colony and metropole and the abolition of the slave trade at the end of the eighteenth century. From the vantage point of Jamaica, the project shows how in the shadow of the Atlantic revolutions, trans-imperial communities integrated on the basis of a shared rejection of revolutionary change and the embracing of imperial and royalist notions of belonging.

• History of the British Empire
• Early Modern History
• History of Colonialism
• Age of Revolutions
• Global History
• History of Science