Project Members

Professor Megan Vaughan 

Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Professor Megan Vaughan list of publications
E-mail: mav26 (@cam.ac.uk)

Megan Vaughan has always worked on the border between the disciplines of history and anthropology. Her research has concentrated on the social and economic history of East/Central Africa. In particular, she has published on the history of famine and food supply, gender relations, and the history of colonial medicine and psychiatry. More recently she has worked on the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and of the creation of ‘creole’ societies. Her present research is on the history of death in Africa and the history of the emotions.

Dr Rebekah Lee 

Department of History, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Rebekah Lee list of publications
Email: r.lee (@gold.ac.uk)

My main area of research has been southern African social and cultural history, with a particular focus on gender, generation and identity in urban South Africa. I am publishing an ethnographic history of African women in apartheid and post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa. I have maintained a strong interest in issues surrounding death and its management through ongoing research on the life histories of African funeral directors, women's participation in informal burial societies, African conversions to Islam, and the history of racialised cemeteries. This project will help me pursue further ethnographic and historical research on the changing cultural economies of death in southern Africa.

(Post-doctoral Researchers)

Dr Walima T. Kalusa 

Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Dr Walima Kalusa's list of publications
Email: chamakalusa (@yahoo.co.uk)

In the last few years, I have carried out research on how medical missionaries in colonial Zambia reconfigured their medical discourse with its related praxis to make their medicine more comprehensible to Africans. My research has further extended to what meanings Africans themselves read in missionary medicine. Currently, I interested in exploring how African miners coped with death on the Zambian Copperbelt during the colonial era.

Dr Mark Lamont 

Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Mark Lamont's list of publications
Email: meruke2 (@yahoo.co.uk)

Broadly stated, Mark Lamont's research interests centre on the social histories of East Africa (Kenya) and the Horn (Somalia, Northern Kenya). My contribution to the death in African history project takes me into the mobile world of Somali pastoralists and traders of the Kenya-Somali borderlands, particularly with respect to the motorized transport of corpses from place of death to place of internment. I am keenly interested in movement and mobility as problems for ethnographic method. Previous research has included field studies of economic liberalization and debates about the 'free market' in the coffee sector of central Kenya (1998); and a more extensive ethno-historical study of growing uncertainties towards Meru age-set formation and generational succession in the twentieth century (2001-2003).