We are delighted to announce that the Leverhulme Trust has awarded one of their prestigious research fellowships to Stephen Kenny for a project titled: 'Dark Medicine: racism, power and the culture of American slavery' (beginning on 1 August 2015).
'Dark Medicine' is a research project exploring the disturbing connections between slavery, ‘race’ and medicine in 19th-century America. The planned book will reveal:
- the deep-rooted racist nature of medical education, research, and practice under slavery
- the career opportunities that ‘Negro medicine’ brought
- the enormous scale and intensity of the medical profession's exploitation of enslaved ‘subjects’.
Using interdisciplinary methods - including collective biography, narratological analysis and data visualisation - 'Dark Medicine' will offer a new examination of white thinking about black health, experiments on slaves, black experiences under such pressures, and long-running patterns of medical racism in slavery’s aftermath.
The fellowship will support Dr Kenny’s research at:
- The Southern Historical Collection in Augusta, Chapel Hill, and New Orleans
- The City Archives and Special Collections
- The Historic New Orleans Collection
- The New Orleans Public Library
- The Rudolph Matas Medical Library.
I am delighted and honoured to have been awarded the fellowship, primarily because it gives me a long awaited opportunity to dig deeper into the archives and to complete my monograph on this topic.
- Stephen Kenny