About Nathan
Dr Nathan Bossoh is a Black British musician, curator, and historian, whose work bridges academic disciplines and connects scholarship with wider publics. His research broadly focuses on the history of modern science and its intersections with empire, religion, and material knowledge. In particular, his work aims to critically examine the production, circulation, recognition, and marginalisation of West African scientific knowledge in British colonial and postcolonial contexts. His most recent work has explored overlooked botanical and medical expertise in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) and within its diasporas in Britain. At present, Bossoh is completing his book manuscript under contract with Palgrave Macmillan entitled Scientific Herbal Medicine and the Making of Ghanaian Modernity, 1889-2002. The book traces the social, cultural, and material dynamics of African ethnobotanical knowledge, demonstrating how the making and expansion of 'scientific herbal medicine' in Ghana intersected with wider struggles over African agency, identity, and scientific legitimacy in colonial, national, and global contexts.
After completing his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at UCL in 2022 Bossoh was appointed to a new role as the first-ever African Collections Research Curator for the Science Museum Group (SMG) between September 2022 and September 2023. In this role he conducted a major collections-based investigation into the SMG’s historic African materials - numbering at over 5,000 - which led to his internal Report appraising the collection and recommending steps for its future development. Bossoh is also the co-curator of The Kola Nut Cannot be Contained, the first in a series of new small exhibitions being held at Wellcome Collection, London surrounding marginalised stories of health and the human experience. The exhibition, which opened to the public between July 2024 and February 2025, explored the global histories, vibrant contemporary traditions, and future innovations surrounding the Kola nut, a small bitter-tasting fruit found growing across West African tropical forests and valued for its medicinal, stimulant, religious, formal and social functions. Bossoh is an Associate of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, and has published in major academic journals as well as in popular forms. He is regularly consulted on topics surrounding decolonisation in STEM through African history; Churches and Black British (under)representation in the sciences; and museum collections and curation.