Academic interests and background
Rebekah is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology. She is primarily interested in medical anthropology and science and technology studies. Her scholarly interests center themes of biomedical science, bodily inheritance, and the politics of temporality in late- and post-colonial Tanzania. She is also interested in multimodal methods, including filmmaking, experimental visual art, fiction, and poetry as method.
As part of the Epidemic Traces project, Rebekah will be working on postdoctoral research, “Living Traces of Containment”, located in an active resettlement community that was built in the 1950s to control leprosy in Rufiji, Tanzania. The ethnography foregrounds questions of carceral disease containment, the politics of skin-bound-bodies, and the inheritance of medical regimes across multiple generations.
Rebekah is also working on a book project, developed from her doctoral thesis. The book explores what happens when African biomedicine shifts the temporality of its focus from the short-term immediacy of communicable disease care toward the intergenerational scope of a genetically inherited, chronic illness—namely, sickle cell disease. The question at the core of this work—how do biogenetic and extra-biomedical forms of heritability coexist and shape lived experiences of the past-made-present in Tanzania?—attends to the frictions, resonances, and entanglements between genetic inheritance and other modes of relating across intergenerational time.
Rebekah received her PhD from Cornell University in 2022, before which she received an MPH in Community Health Sciences and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago Anthropology and Global Health Joint Degree Program. She was also a Mellon Graduate Fellow at the Cornell Society for Humanities in 2020-2021.
Courses taught
- Autumn 2023: SOSANT2120 -- Regional Ethnography: Africa
Awards
- Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (2018-2019)
- National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (2019-2020)
Affiliation
- Postdoctoral Fellow in Epidemic Traces (2023-2027)
- Forms of Ethnography - Ethnography as Form