Dr. John Nott

Biography

John Nott is a Research Fellow at the School of Social and Political Science, where his research focuses on the history of medicine and economic history, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts. He is currently involved in Lukas Engelmann's ERC-funded project titled 'Epidemiological Revolution: The History of Epidemiological Reasoning in the Twentieth Century'. His work includes a monograph that details the economic and medical history of surveillance in Anglophone Africa. Additionally, he is a principal investigator on a collaborative British Academy-funded project that engages with historical ethnography on demographic health surveys, exploring the origins of contemporary epidemiological demographic data in countries like Ghana, Tanzania, and Malawi. Nott completed his PhD at the University of Leeds, focusing on the history of nutrition and nutritional medicine in Ghana during the late nineteenth century. His forthcoming monograph, 'Feast and Famine: Food, Health, and History in Ghana’s Long Twentieth Century', is expected to be published by UCL Press in early 2025. Before his appointment at Edinburgh, he was a fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana, and has also worked at Maastricht University on an ERC-funded project, 'Making Clinical Sense', studying medical education technologies.

Research Interests