Melanie Boehi is a Swiss historian working as a researcher, curator and editor at the intersection of the humanities, science and art.

She has an MA degree (2011) from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and a PhD degree (2018) from the University of Basel, Switzerland. For her MA thesis, Being/becoming the ‘Cape Town flower sellers’, she researched the history of flower selling in Cape Town with a focus on visual and public history. Her PhD research project, A South African social garden, was a political history of the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town. During her PhD, she was a fellow of the Humer Foundation at the Centre for African Studies Basel and a fellow of the University of Basel’s Research Fund for Young Researchers. Upon completing her PhD degree, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) awarded her a postdoc.mobility fellowship (2018) to join the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg, South Africa, to work on a new research project about the biography, work and archive of South African-German journalist Ruth Weiss. The SNSF subsequently awarded her a postdoctoral.mobility return grant (2022) to conclude this project while being based as postdoctoral researcher at the Section d’histoire at the Université de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Melanie’s main research interests are botanical gardens and plants, museums, journalism and media history. She moves between the fields of the environmental humanities, museum and heritage studies, global history, postcolonial studies and media studies. She is particularly interested in questions of methodology and form, and combines conventional academic research with artistic research, firmly believing that they are equally relevant.

Melanie’s research has been published in academic journals like Environmental Humanities and The Architectural Review, in various edited books, in newspapers and magazines like the Mail & Guardian and Chimurenga, and as podcasts, including an episode for The Wiser Podcast. She co-edited the book The Politics of Nature and Science in Southern Africa and A* Magazine, the official publication for the arts programme of the 7th European Conference on African Studies. She initiated Nowseum - a museum of now as a platform for public history, and co-founded and co-curates the Centre for Plant Interpretation, an experimental platform for transdisciplinary research on plant communication. She curated several exhibitions related to her research, and co-curated a two-day festival programme for the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival.

Melanie has taught courses on plant history, African history, archives and journalism history at the University of Lucerne and the University of Basel. She regularly gives talks as a guest lecturer, at academic conferences, and in public spaces like exhibitions and museums.