CMENAS Lecture. "The Body and the Body Politic in the Middle East and North Africa--History, Traditional Healing, and Biomedicine"

Ellen Amster is the Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at McMaster University, and Associate Professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and History. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of North Africa and France, her research on science in the French-Islamic colonial encounter was first a book, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas ) and now extends to a field and Arabic course for students in Morocco and CIHR-funded global health work in maternal and infant health. Her recent articles touch on political Islam, Islamic biopolitics, the history of public health, and Sufism; her current research includes Muslim midwifery, medical humanities, the material and visual cultures of religion, the body, and women’s history. She has created the History of Medicine and Medical Humanities Research Portal, a resource for all researchers with library, archival, museum, and digital collections. http://medhumanities.mcmaster.ca/