Dr. Reiner Prass is a historian living in Erfurt who has worked for a long time on agrarian history and the history of literacy in France and Germany and has recently focussed on the history of knowledge and of sub-Saharan Africa in the pre-colonial period. In his current research project, he studies the conditions of the production of geographical, scientific and anthropological knowledge about north-eastern Africa by European travellers, and the trans-imperial cooperation in this knowledge-production. Publications include: Forschungsreise und Wissensproduktion in Afrika in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, 2019, URL: www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/fdae-1728 (09.06.2021).