Leverhulme Research Fellowship for Dr Stephen Kenny

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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