Staff profile

I am a PhD candidate in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, holding an AHRC Northern Bridge collaborative doctoral award in partnership with the National Museum of Scotland. The project extends across the departments of Philosophy, History and Anthropology at Durham University, and is affiliated with Uppsala University. My dissertation is on the knowledge practices of Jamaican physician Dr Archibald Hewan (1832-1883), the first known black medical missionary in West Africa. It explores Hewan's collection of medical and ethnological data in his creation of a scientific persona, highlighting how he sought to challenge European prejudices about Africans. Whether through his sponsors in the Free Church of Scotland or via West African medical practitioners, his activities reveal a network of intersecting theological, colonial, biomedical and indigenous ways of knowing. The project thereby illuminates the dynamic agency of people of African descent as sources, producers and brokers of knowledge, while they were simulatenously being marginalised and depreciated in the nineteenth-century imperial world. 

Research Interests

• Transnational History
• Museum and collecting practices 
• Nineteenth-century medical data strategies 
• Nineteenth-century anthropology and antiquarianism 
• History of Information 
• Heritage Studies 

• Transnational history
• Museum and collecting practices
• History of biomedical data strategies
• History of Information
• Heritage Studies