Between Archives and the Ivory Tower: Colonial Entanglements at ETH Zurich

What happens when one of the world’s most renowned universities of science and technology begins to examine its own colonial history? And who carries this work intellectually, emotionally, and institutionally?

In this episode of Missing Chapters, Anja Nunyola Glover speaks with historian and doctoral researcher Sarujan Theivendran about the colonial entanglements of ETH Zurich, racism and classism in higher education, and the question of who is perceived as naturally belonging in academic spaces.

Sarujan Theivendran has been a doctoral researcher at the Chair of Modern World History at ETH Zurich since August 2025, where he works on the SNSF-funded project Engineering Empires from the Margins: Global Techno-Colonialism and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (c. 1860–1980). His doctoral research examines global entanglements and disciplinary transformations within geology, focusing on the careers of ETH geology professor Albert Heim and his son Arnold Heim, a geologist who worked internationally in the petroleum industry. He holds an M.A. in Contemporary History from the University of Fribourg, where his master’s thesis examined Swiss development cooperation in Sri Lanka (1961–1982), and has professional experience in archives and museums.

Together, we discuss:

• his path into academia
• classism, racism, and belonging in higher education
• precarious academic working conditions
• the colonial entanglements of ETH Zurich
• the role of counter-archives and memory politics
• why the natural sciences cannot be understood separately from colonial history
• representation and responsibility within academic institutions
• funding cuts, political shifts, and the future of anti-racist research

We discuss why colonial history is not a marginal footnote to the history of science, but central to understanding how knowledge, institutions, and global structures of power have been shaped.

? Content note: This episode discusses racism, colonial violence, structural inequalities, and forms of exclusion in higher education.

This episode is part of the project Transforming Educational Spaces: Addressing Racism, Embedding Intersectionality at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies.

Book recommendation from this episode:
Tauben Fliegen Auf by Melinda Nadj Abonji