March Newsletter

Posted by C3W Admin on March 25 2025

We have gathered together the latest news and events, together with some content not available on the website and put it into a Newsletter, see below.

If you would like to receive our Newsletters in your mailbox each month, please sign up below. We promise to only send you news from the project.

NEWSLETTER MARCH 2025

Welcome to this month’s newsletter.

We are currently enjoying sunny weather in this part of the world, and it certainly feels like spring has arrived.

Our project team is actively engaged in writing and conducting field research. We look forward to sharing some intriguing blogs and updates with you soon.

In the meantime, please take a moment to review the news, publications, and events listed below, and be sure to sign up before it’s too late.

Upcoming Events

African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return

A Public Lecture with Prof Nana Osei Quarshie, Yale University

3^rd April 2025, 6-7.30pm, Clore Lecture Theatre, followed by a drinks reception

Tickets are free but limited, please register here.

Abstract: West Africans were far from passive victims of European-imposed psychiatric concepts and institutions. Rather, they enchanted the British colonial asylum in Accra (contemporary Ghana) by accommodating European psychiatric practices principally as experiences within the dynamic tapestry of African ritual and political concerns over territorial control, bodily afflictions, and psychological belonging within families, communities, and states. African people mobilized practices associated by the mid-nineteenth century with healing and harming at shrines of territorial spirits to politically harness the development of psychiatric social control. That is, European psychiatry did not colonize African minds, nor did it displace African psychotherapeutic norms. It was instead built on and grafted onto a repertoire of African healing and harming practices through socio-economic, political, and ritual transactions that, in the case of coastal Ghana, unfolded over the course of centuries.

Nana Osei Quarshie is Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Yale School of Medicine. An anthropologist and historian by training, Quarshie examines the relationship among mental healing, political expulsions, immigration, and urban belonging in West Africa since the seventeenth century.

For information please contact Katy (k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk)

This event is hosted by Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Resarch on Mental Health in partnership with the Raphael Samuel History Centre with support from the UKRI and Wellcome Trust.

Presentations by the Project Team

Dora Vargha contributed to the Research Seminar ‘History of Medicine’ led by Lauren Kassell at the European University Institute. Dora co-presented a work in progress as part of the Cambridge History of Medicine with co-author Guillaume Lachenal on March 13, 2025 in Florence, Italy.

Dora Vargha presented the Lancet article ’The end and what comes after’ co-authored with Laura Salisbury et al. at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science’s Publication Slam on March 5, 2025 in Berlin, Germany.

Publications

I am pleased to share the news of the publication of “States without People,” a book Maziyar Ghiabi co-authored with his colleague Billie Jeanne Brownlee.

They dedicated approximately ten years to researching and developing “States without People,” conducting fieldwork across Europe and the Middle East. While the past 18 months have involved the complexities of book production, this period coincided with significant and tragic changes in the Middle East, yet the book’s argument remains robust.

In “States without People,” we contend that the Middle East has emerged as a testing ground for global politics, particularly in relation to what we refer to as ‘the culture of the right.’

For more details, please visit the publisher’s website:
https://www.mqup.ca/states-without-people-products-9780228024156.php?page_id=121898.

Media

Dora Vargha was interviewed by the New York Times on the history of epidemics, polio and the 5th anniversary of the WHO’s declaration of Covid as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Dora’s research was featured in the newspaper on March 11, 2025, in the article History Isn’t Entirely Repeating Itself in Covid’s Aftermath.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/health/covid-pandemic-history.html