Data, Race and Empire: African Health, Scottish Missions and the Information Strategies of Dr Archibald Hewan (1832-1883) Arts and Humanities Research Council PhD Studentship
Durham University
Project Summary
The Data, Race and Empire PhD studentship offers an innovative methodology for knowledge-exchange and collaboration between Durham University, the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) and Uppsala University on the extraordinary biomedical career of Dr Archibald Hewan (1832-1883), the first black missionary physician in West Africa. The student will be based at Durham University, but will perform research at the NMS and receive further training at Uppsala University. Focusing on recently discovered Hewan sources, and combining methods from Science and Technology Studies with training in the NMS collections, the student will explore Hewan’s career as a black physician who adapted imperial communication networks to proactively collect, interpret and disseminate biomedical information in ways that disrupted several of the European stereotypes about the people and culture of Africa.
Studentship Summary The studentship is funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council in collaboration with the Northern Bridge Consortium. It covers tuition fees (British home rate), expenses, room and board. The main supervisor is Durham University's Prof Matthew Daniel Eddy, Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science. The successful candidate will be based in the Science, Medicine and Society research group in Durham University's Department of Philosophy and spend time researching in the African collections of the National Museum of Scotland. The student will also be part of the Northern Bridge AHRC Consortium, which offers further training and placement opportunities.
How to Apply The successful applicant will have a bachelors and a masters degree in History, HPS (History and Philosophy of Science), STS (Science and Technology Studies), or subjects such as museology, anthropology, archaeology, etc. that offer significant and demonstrable training on the history and science and/or medicine. Students with training on the pre-digital history of health and communication in the British Empire or on the pre-20th century history of Africa will also be considered.
To apply for the studentship, please submit a PhD application no later than 14 February 2025 to Durham University Department of Philosophy. Indicate you are applying for the 'Data, Race and Empire' Northern Bridge Award. Early applications prior to 14 February are most welcome and highly encouraged. Preliminary questions about the application may be sent directly to Prof Eddy (
m.d.eddy@durham.ac.uk). Durham's PhD application portal can be found unit the 'Apply for postgraduate study' tab at:
https://studyatdurham.microsoftcrmportals.com/en-US/ When preparing your application, be sure to include a full CV, three reference letters, and two 3,000-5,000 word writing samples. In lieu of a PhD proposal, please read the project description (appended below) and submit a 1,000 word personal statement that explains how your previous academic experience will bring insight to the themes, methods and questions the project will be addressing.
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PROJECT SUMMARY
Data, Race and Empire:
African Health, Scottish Missions and the Information Strategies of Dr Archibald Hewan (1832-1883)
Research Question Historians have traditionally ignored the contributions of black physicians and intellectuals who lived during the long nineteenth century in the transatlantic world. Joining the expertise and resources of Durham University and the National Museums of Scotland (NMS), this PhD project seeks to address this lacuna by focusing on the biomedical career of Dr Archibald Hewan (1832-1883), the first black physician to serve in British West Africa as a Free Church of Scotland missionary doctor. Hewan was born in Jamaica, studied medicine at Edinburgh University, worked in Old Calabar (modern Nigeria) and then settled in London as a medical practitioner and expert on the diseases and natural history of Africa. Using newly discovered Hewan manuscripts, specimens and artefacts, the project seeks to answer the following research question: How did Hewan use African health and natural history data within church and medical communication networks to become a scientific expert?
Research Context During the early 19th century black scholars from the Atlantic world studied medicine in Scottish hospitals and universities. Aside from one chapter in Mia Bay’s ground-breaking The White Image in the Black Mind (2000), most studies that mention 19th century black physicians are largely biographical and give little attention to the roles they played as knowledge-brokers, as collectors and disseminators of data, within transatlantic information networks. Likewise, though historians of global health have written about the medical activities of 19th-century missionaries, a Hewan biography, surprisingly, has not been written. Only a handful of studies have briefly outlined his medical career, or have glossed his missionary activities. Similar professional and intellectual gaps exist in the literature for other black physicians as well.
Additionally, though black physicians working in the Atlantic world collected and disseminated important information from local populations relating to health and human rights, research on their place within the media ecology of empire is thin. In Hewan’s case, he operated within the Free Church’s global information and communication networks. While media historians have explored how other imperial institutions operated as global information machines and though church historians have investigated the role played by communications technologies within ecclesiastical networks, the Free Church’s status as an organisation that collected and managed medical data and the role played by its members as information gatherers and strategists, particularly those of African descent, remains virtually unmapped. This project seeks to shed new light on the subject by using Hewan as a case study.
Research Methods During the mid 19th century, intelligencers with competing information-gathering strategies circulated data in the British Empire via diverse media. The student will explore Hewan’s role in this context with historically-orientated Science and Technology Studies (STS) methods that reconstruct how cultural values shaped biomedical data. In particular, the socio-historical methods developed by Ruha Benjamin and Meredith Broussard will be used to reconstruct how data related to black actors was collected, who collected it, why it was collected and where it was circulated. The student will also learn to employ STS methods developed by Matthew Daniel Eddy, Zachary Kingdon, Linda Burnett-Andersson, all members of the supervisory team, that treat the material culture of manuscripts, specimens and artifacts as important historical forms of biomedical data. Additionally, curators in the National Museum of Scotland will offer hands-on methodological training to the student in their collections.
Special attention will be given to how these exciting sources offer insight into Hewan’s agency as a black data-broker who adapted ecclesiastical and medical communication networks of empire to proactively collect, interpret and disseminate information in ways that disrupted several European stereotypes about the people and culture of Africa.
Museum Training In addition to writing a thesis under the supervision of Prof Eddy and other experts based in Durham's anthropology, history and philosophy departments, the successful candidate will learn transferable skills relevant to working in a large, public facing museum. The student will gain object interpretation skills from a training project in the NMS Edinburgh collections, and management and collection accessibility skills through training sessions offered by the museum’s Data and Systems teams. The student's understanding of the collections will be enhanced through writing several brief reports on objects and they will also benefit from working with NMS curatorial staff in developing a new approach to representing missionary collections.
Research Community Durham’s Philosophy Department will be the lead department responsible for coordinating academic training and support, and for advising the student on how to access Durham's robust history of science and medicine research community. The successful student will join the Science, Medicine and Society (SMS) cluster, a specialised research group within the Department with a longstanding history in mentoring and training postgraduate researchers. Upon arrival, the student will be offered doctoral training by the Arts and Humanities Faculty and by the Department on practical topics ranging from keeping an organised work schedule to how to publish a research paper. Further practical workshops of this nature are offered on a regular basis to postgraduates students every term. In addition to the advice, training and support regularly offered or recommended by the supervisory team, the student will be part of Philosophy's graduate cohort of MA, MRes and PhD candidates. All first-year PhD students attend Eidos, the weekly doctoral research forum, which helps them design, discuss and implement their research. They also attend departmental workshops that address practical topics such as understanding the job market, publishing articles, submitting conference abstracts, etc. The student will also be able to access the postgraduate training and mentoring opportunities offered by the History and Anthropology Departments, the two partner departments of the project.
Supervisory Team Prof Matthew Daniel Eddy (lead supervisor) is Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science in Durham University’s Department of Philosophy. He is a cultural historian of science and medicine in modern Britain and its former empire. His first book The Language of Mineralogy: John Walker, Chemistry and the Edinburgh Medical School (Routledge: 2008; 2016) focused on the different kinds of interdisciplinary data that Scottish middle-class professionals used to create the emerging field of environmental science during the Enlightenment. His recent book, Media and the Mind: Art, Science and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (Chicago: 2023), used hundreds of notebooks kept on scientific topics during the Scottish Enlightenment to argue that ‘reason’ was a contingent skill learned through the manipulation and re-manipulation of manuscript media technologies. He is currently writing a book about the relationship between race, information and science in the pre-digital Atlantic world.
Prof Justin Willis (supervisor) is Professor of Modern African History in Durham University's History Department. His work has been largely concerned with identity, authority and social change in Africa over the last two hundred years. He is author of Mombasa, the Swahili and the Making of the Mijikenda (Clarendon: 1993) and Potent Brews. A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa 1850-1999 (Currey: 2002). He is presently researching debates over Uganda's future in 1979-80, in the months after Amin's fall, and the history of saving and lending in Africa since the 1940s.
Prof Hannah Brown (supervisor) is Professor of Medical Anthropology in Durham University’s Department of Anthropology. Focusing on West and East Africa, her publications focus on the delivery of biomedicine in developmental spaces. Previous work includes ethnographic fieldwork in hospitals and with health managers. Her current work is funded by an ERC starting grant, AliveAFRICA: Animals, Livelihoods and Wellbeing in Africa. This project explores changing animal-based economies in Kenya and Sierra Leone, and the implications of human-animal entanglements for health and well-being.
Dr Zachary Kingdon (non-HEI advisor) is Senior Curator of African Collections in the National Museums of Scotland. He is an expert on colonial collecting in Africa, the anthropology of creative spractice, and museology and participatory practice. He is author of A Host of Devils: The History and Context of the Making of Makonde Spirit Sculpture (Routledge: 2002) and Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa: A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows (Bloomsbury: 2019).
Dr Linda Andersson Burnett (external advisor) is Associate Professor and Research Group Director in the Department of the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is co-author of Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750-1820 (Yale: 2025).
