John Nott is an economic and medical historian who is at MIASA completing a monograph on the history of food and health in Ghana since the late nineteenth century. Until recently he was employed as a post-doctoral researcher on Maastricht University’s ERC-funded project, ‘Making clinical sense: a comparative study of how doctors learn in digital times.’ Prior to this, John completed an ESRC-funded PhD in the School of History at the University of Leeds. His work has been published in Medical History, Medicine Anthropology Theory, Population Development Review and Social History of Medicine.
MIASA Project: Between famine and obesity: the long history of food and health in modern Ghana, c. 1896-2020
This fellowship will be used to complete a book project which is drawn from my earlier PhD research. Covering one hundred and twenty years of dramatic political, economic and environmental change, this book will present a unique history of the relationship between food and health in modern West Africa. By integrating the histories of famine, infant malnutrition and contemporary epidemics of diabetes and obesity, this book will o!er the most thorough and expansive exploration of nutritional health in any African context. The temporal breadth of this project is complemented by a comparative analysis which considers two economically and ecologically distinct spaces. Through the comparison of Ghana’s historically food insecure and relatively underdeveloped Northern savannah and its wealthy, food-secure South–inclusive of the fertile forest economy and its attendant urban spaces–this is also the first study to investigate the interaction between food and health in proximate yet readily contrasted environments. This fellowship will be used to complete the research on and write the book’s final chapter, a history of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and food-related cancers. This research will benefit hugely from time spent at the University of Ghana, and will allow this work to build on pre-existing relationships with several faculties at the University as well as with colleagues in the GHS.
