Dr Rebekah Lee

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Department of History, Goldsmiths College, University of London

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Biography

Dr. Rebekah Lee is Senior Lecturer in History at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has published work on South African history and culture, including the book African Women and Apartheid: Migration and Settlement in Urban South Africa (IB Tauris, 2009). Her research interests span issues of gender, migration, urbanization, health, religion, identity, and material culture. In 2012 she directed her first documentary, ‘The Price of Death’, on the township funeral business in South Africa. This was part of a larger AHRC-funded collaboration on the history of death in Africa (www.gold.ac.uk/deathinafrica). In 2013 the film won the Richard Werbner Prize for Visual Ethnography at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s International Festival for Ethnographic Film. Dr. Lee holds degrees from Harvard University (B.A.) and the University of Oxford (M.Phil and D.Phil), and has taught at universities in the United Kingdom, United States and South Africa.

Project

Health, Healing and Illness in African History

While at IASH, I will be working on my book Health, Healing and Illness in African History, which aims to provide a comprehensive and interdisciplinary analysis of the central events, actors, institutions and ideas which have shaped the history of health and illness in Africa from the pre-colonial period up to the present day.