Thanks to a Marconi Fellowship, Thandeka was able to spend the month of March 2023 going through some archival materials at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Specifically, Thandeka looked at materials sent by British doctors and nurses in which they reminisced about their work in Africa in the last two decades of Empire. The materials, which are part of the Oxford Develpment Records Project, contained memoirs, diaries, reports, photographs, letters and much more. Thandeka’s work at the Bodleian will feed into the Cartographies of Cancer project at King’s College London, which is funded by the British Academy and the Wellcome Trust.
As part of her time at the Bodleian, Thandeka gave two presentations about her work in the archives. On 10 April 2023, as part of the Weston Library Coffee Mornings, she gave a short presentation on the sort of materials she had come across as part the Weston Library Coffee Mornings, which you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnypNi8qxwI. On 5 May 2023, Thandeka also spoke about a workshop on the hidden voices in the archives, especially those of non-white people and women as part of Oxford’s Medical Humanities Programme, which you can find here: https://torch.ox.ac.uk/event/hidden-figures-informal-archives-and-the-making-of-medical-worlds-in-africa.
