Biography

Rémi Dewière is a historian interested in Islamic West Africa in the Early Modern and Modern period. In particular, he focuses on State practices, diplomacy and circulations in Central Sahel, with a special focus on the Borno sultanate from the late medieval to the 19^th century. His book, Du lac Tchad à La Mecque. Le sultanat du Borno et son monde (xvi^e-xvii^e siècle) (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017), provides a new perspective on the functioning of an Islamic Sahelian state in the Early Modern period and its relationship with the world around it through the trans-Saharan routes.
During his fellowship, he will study the bureaucracy and the establishment of a complex administration system in Sahelian Islamic states, from the 16^th century to the 1930s, in order to understand how Islamic rulers from Sahel expressed their power and state continuity in a fragile environment and, at the same time, dealt with the scarcity of writing materials – such as paper – usually closely associated with the development of a complex state administration.
Rémi received a Master (2008) and a PhD in African History (2015) from Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University (IMAf) and won a prize for his PhD thesis (2016) from the Institut sur l’Islam et les Sociétés du Monde Musulman (EHESS). From 2012 to 2017, he was Research Assistant in the ERC Project ConfigMed and was EHESS Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre Alexandre-Koyré (CAK) in 2017/2018.