PD Dr Felicity Jensz is a historian whose work ranges across colonial, missionary, and transnational history, with a particular focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Working across archives in Australia, Germany, Britain, and beyond, she explores how missionaries, colonial governments, and indigenous peoples shaped — and were shaped by — the wider imperial world: from mission schools in colonial Victoria to Bible translations in West Africa, from internment camps in East Africa during the First World War to postcolonial religious memory in the Weimar Republic.
Her research draws together themes as varied as gender and family life, media and print culture, education and childhood, material collections and museum provenance, and the politics of translation. Sources range from private diaries and missionary periodicals to colonial correspondence, ethnographic objects, and early film — and her writing engages both the intimate lives of individual missionaries and the structural dynamics of transnational religious networks.
Based until recently at the Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics at the University of Münster, she has contributed to major international research projects including the DFG and AHRC-funded Global Bible project on colonial Bible translation, and collaborative work on colonial traces in Westphalian collections and public spaces. Her output spans monographs, edited volumes, journal special issues, exhibition catalogues, and public writing, and reaches scholarly and wider audiences across Europe, Australia, and beyond.