Laurence Douny

Laurence Douny is an anthropologist and Africanist affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, where she is a member of the The Body of Animals Working Group in Department III. She holds a PhD from University College London (UCL), awarded in 2007 for research on Dogon cosmological landscapes funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation. Her work bridges anthropology, material culture studies, and the history of science, with a focus on West African indigenous knowledge systems. She co-edited the 2023 special issue Making Animal Materials in Time for Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences and is currently writing Elusive Materials: the Hidden Silk Road of West Africa.

Her research explores the intersection of materiality, ecology, and cultural heritage, including studies on West African wild silk textiles and the legacy of slave trades on heritage landscapes. She has held roles as a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL and a research associate at the Free University of Brussels (ULB). Her projects emphasize interdisciplinary approaches to understanding how materials and practices shape socio-environmental relations over time.

Key contributions include her monograph Living in a Landscape of Scarcity (2014) and collaborations with institutions like The British Museum. She has organized workshops on themes such as Animal Materialities and Proteins & Fibers Inquiry, reflecting her commitment to advancing dialogues between anthropology and the history of science.