About Nathan
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Current Work
Nathan Bossoh is a Research Fellow in the History Department at Southampton University. There he is undertaking a project examining the rise of herbal medicine as a field of research in colonial and post-colonial Ghana with a focus on the relationship between ethnobotanical knowledge, pharmacology, and museum colonial collections. Drawing primarily on approaches found within history of science, material culture, and science and religion, Nathan’s research seeks to historicise the renewed promotion of ‘scientifically backed herbal medicine’ in 21st-century Africa through archival, oral, and collections-based sources. In doing so, his research underscores the importance of present-day collaborative engagements (between academia, museums, Indigenous knowledge holders and other stakeholders) towards herbal scientific research for the future of Ghana’s biodiversity, healthcare, and economy. His project is titled Botanical Knowledge, Scientific Legitimacy, and the Rise of Herbal Medicine Research in Ghana.
Previous to this Nathan was the first ever appointed African Collections Research Curator at the London Science Museum between September 2022 and September 2023. In this role he conducted a major collections-based investigation into the almost 5000 object records of the Museum’s ‘Wellcome’ African material (formally belonging to the Wellcome Trust). This role led to his over fifty-page Report appraising the collection and recommending steps for its future enhancement. Nathan has written on various history of science and collections topics for both academic and public audiences, and is curator of The Kola Nut Cannot Be Contained.
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Nathan's broad Research
Nathan earned his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from UCL in 2022 and is an STS Honorary Research Fellow at UCL. In broad terms, his research situates around the intersecting themes of empire, race, and religion as entangled operations in the historical production and transmission of science, medicine and museums. A core component of his work explores how African knowledge, belief and practice, as well as European perceptions of Africanness, influenced numerous historical developments in science, medicine, and Western collecting practices. His main period of interest is roughly 1750 to the present, and regionally he focuses on Britain and West Africa but has secondary interests in modern Japan as well. Nathan utilises postcolonial, decolonial, and material cultural approaches, and as an applied historian engaged in interdisciplinary research he actively draws on perspectives gathered from a range of fields including science and religion; science and technology studies; environmental humanities; African studies; and museum studies.
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