Rebekah Lee

Senior Lecturer in History, Goldsmiths College, University of London

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 (2009). Her research interests span
issues of health, gender, migration, urbanization, religion, identity and material culture. Her most
recent major project, a study of death and memory in modern South Africa, was part of a broader
collaboration on the history of death in Africa from 1800 to the present day (see www.gold.ac.uk/
deathinafrica). In 2011–12, she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard
University. In 2012, she directed her first documentary, ‘The Price of Death’, on the township
funeral business in South Africa. The film won the Richard Werbner Award for Visual Ethnography
at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s International Festival for Ethnographic Film in 2013. 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, the United States and South Africa.

During her stay at SCAS, Lee will work on the book ‘Health, Healing and Illness in African History’.
This book will offer, for the first time, a comprehensive introduction to the history of African health
and healing from the pre-colonial period to the present day, emphasizing Africans’ own understanding
and management of health and illness. It will utilize case studies from across the African continent and
an innovative interdisciplinary perspective drawing on scholarship from history, anthropology, human
geography, public health and development studies.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2015-16.