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Nancy Rose Hunt

Contact Information

Email: nrhunt
Office: 427 Grinter Hall

Professor Hunt is on leave for the 2022-23 academic year.

Nancy Rose Hunt is working on madness, psychiatry, and mental health care in Africa, with attention to metaphors, diagnostic categories, and street vagrants, as well as psychiatric interventions in zones of conflict, migratory politics, and securitization. Her next book will be a historical ethnography of madness in and outside of a psychiatric hospital in the Congolese post-conflict, border city of Bukavu.

She spearheaded and co-edits with Achille Mbembe a book series at Duke University Press, called Theory in Forms. Hunt has two recent articles in historiography and theory in History and Theory.

Professor of History & African Studies at the University of Florida since 2016, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 for “Ideation as History.” In 2016, she also received a Fulbright to work in an STS global health laboratory in Paris and on migratory corridors in Niger.

Hunt has received three year-long residential fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin; the Institute of Advanced Study in Paris (with EURIAS); and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. She has received grants from the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-IIE, Fulbright-Hays, the Ford Foundation, and NSF.

A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke, 2016) received the Martin A. Klein Prize from the American Historical Association. It considers nervous moods, policing, and securitization in colonial Congo with attention to “therapeutic insurgencies” and futures. A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Work, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Duke, 1999) is an innovative ethnographic history of objects and childbearing; it received the Melville Herskovits Book Prize from the African Studies Association. Suturing New Medical Histories of Africa (LIT Verlag, 2013) began as the Carl Schlettwein Lecture at the University of Basel. She has done fieldwork in and near Bujumbura, Burundi; Accra, Ghana; Niamey and Agadez, Niger; and in many cities of Congo-Zaire: Kisangani, Mbandaka, Kinshasa, and Bukavu.

As Professor of History and of Obstetrics/Gynecology, Hunt shaped the Joint PhD Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) over a 19-year period. Her scholarship has long focused on the history and anthropology of medicine, reproduction, and humanitarianism in Africa, with gender, technological, and subaltern themes: childbearing, abortion, breastfeeding, and surgical, transport, writing, and visual technologies. Her many articles have appeared in such locations as Past & Present, The Lancet, History Workshop Journal, Africa, Journal of African History, Somatosphere, and Cultural Anthropology.

From her undergraduate years at the University of Chicago, Hunt worked as an archivist in distinguished institutions in Chicago and Springfield, Illinois (1978-86). She recast acquisition priorities in an Illinois university archive under her direction, towards global 1968 and its aftermaths and in a town along the Mason-Dixon line. She has made these sensibilities and skills—attentiveness to provenance, layers, immediacy, the ordinary—valuable in creative projects ever since, including ethnographic-film making and the identification and conservation of vernacular archives. Since 2000, she has been researching sequential or comic art production in Congo, notably the oeuvre of Papa Mfumu’eto le Premier, whose archive is now part of multiple preservation, publication, and exhibition projects linking scholars and institutions in Florida, Europe, and Congo.

Co-editor for four years of the leading journal Gender & History, she conceptualized and directed the “Women’s Health in the City of Accra Project.” This transnational, qualitative research training seminar (1999-2001) encouraged Ghanaian and Michigan student participants to collaborate, investigate, and document, while writing ethnographic stories.

Over the years, Hunt has taught: “Health and Illness in African Worlds,” “Imagining the Congo,” “Modern Africa,” “Historiography,” and “Theory for Historians.” At Florida, she is teaching a Quest course, “What is Madness?” and also preparing “Africans in Europe.”

Professor Hunt has a PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1992, and a BA with Honors in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, 1980.