Dr Nathan Bossoh

Research groups

Research interests

• Science, belief, and global knowledge exchange in the British Empire  
• Medical and scientific knowledge in modern African history 
• Museum imperial legacies, material culture, collections and decolonisation
• Biodiversity conservation and global health challenges
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Current research

Nathan's project investigates the historical uses and circulation of various medicinal plants found across Western Africa in order to analyse the wider relationship between ethnobotany,  museums, pharmacology, religion, and drug commercialisation. Centring on specific botanical case studies - kola nut, bitter cola and the Calabar bean - his project utilises both material cultural and applied historical approaches in order to 1) shed light on the development of colonial and postcolonial plant-medicine research in Anglophone West Africa, and 2) highlight the value of museum biocollections as significant resources for innovative interdisciplinary ecological and health research outputs. His project is titled 'From African plants to plant-based pharmaceuticals: re-examining the growth of plant medicine research in West Africa through colonial botanical collections (1880 - 1997)'