Julia published Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global (Ohio University Press). The book presents the stories of scientists at the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), a biomedical center founded in 1936. It analyzes the strategies and conditions that allowed the institute to endure and thrive through successive political and scientific regimes of the interwar period, the postwar period, the transition to independence, the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Museveni presidency. Virus Research in Twentieth Century Uganda combines methods and themes from the history of medicine and public health, science and technology studies, and African studies to show that the story of the UVRI and the people who worked there transforms our understanding of the nature of local and international expertise and the evolution of global health research over the course of the twentieth century.
Julia Cummiskey
Department of History, University of Tennessee Chattanooga
Selling Wellness: Marketing Materials, Behaviors, and Services for Improved Health in Modern Africa
Combining histories of Africa, business, and medicine and global health, this project investigates strategies used by corporations, medical service providers, and public health campaigns to promote consumption of products and adoption of behaviors and procedures in the name of health in the past century. It examines marketing materials and documents relating to their conception, implementation, and reception for insight into how producers of medical products in and outside Africa understood and shaped the gendered, political, and cultural identities of potential consumers. The project will make a major contribution to our understanding of the way that past, present, and future global health interventions in Africa interact with local ideas about and knowledge of health products, behaviors, and services; how social, political, and cultural developments affect design and reception of health-related messaging; and how the public and private sectors interacted, converged, and diverged over time in the spheres of health and medicine.