Neil Kodesh

Biography

I’m a historian of East Africa with a particular emphasis on the Great Lakes region. My research and teaching interests center on medical history, historical anthropology, and multidisciplinary methodologies for writing African history. My first book, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda, examined how the domains of politics and public healing were intimately entwined in Buganda, a kingdom located on the northwest shores of Lake Victoria in present-day Uganda, from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. The book won the African Studies Association Best Book Prize (formerly known as the Melville J. Herskovits Prize).

I am currently working on two projects. The first is an historical ethnography of Mengo Hospital, the first hospital established in present-day Uganda. The second – Mapping Hot Spots: ‘One Health’ and the History of Infectious Disease Research in Africa – examines the constitution and mapping of disease “hot spots” through an exploration of the long history of research and intervention on disease ecology in western Uganda.

Education

Ph.D., Northwestern University
M.A., Northwestern University
B.A., Pomona College

Books

Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda

Neil Kodesh. Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. University of Virginia Press, 2010.

Winner of the 2011 African Studies Association Herskovits Award, Beyond the Royal Gaze shifts the perspective from which we view early African politics by asking what Buganda, a kingdom located on the northwest shores of Lake Victoria in present-day Uganda, looked like to people who were not of the center but nevertheless became central to its functioning. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines—history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology—Neil Kodesh argues that the domains of politics and public healing were intimately entwined in Buganda from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted throughout Buganda, Kodesh demonstrates how efforts to ensure collective prosperity and perpetuity—usually expressed in the language of health and healing—lay at the heart of community-building processes in Buganda. Kodesh’s work offers a novel approach to the use of oral sources and opens up new possibilities for researching and writing histories of more distant periods in Africa’s past. Beyond the Royal Gaze will appeal to students and scholars of health and healing, political complexity, and the production of knowledge in places where limited documentary evidence exists.

Selected Publications

• “The Language of Syphilis in Colonial Uganda,” in Textures of Power: Central Africa in the Long Twentieth Century edited by Florence Bernault, Emery Kalema, and Benoit Henriet (Leuven University Press: 2025, pp.253-270).
• “Networks of Knowledge: Clanship and Collective Well-Being in Buganda.” Journal of African History 49, 2 (2008): 197-216.
• “History from the Healer’s Shrine: Genre, Historical Imagination, and Early Ganda History.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49, 3 (2007): 527-552.
• “Renovating Tradition: The Discourse of Succession in Colonial Buganda.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, 3 (2001): 511-541.

Advisor To

• Lindsay Ehrisman
• Leslie Sabakinu
• Yadhav Deerpaul

Selected Awards

• Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award. University of Wisconsin-Madison. 2024.
• Vilas Mid-Career Investigator Award. University of Wisconsin-Madison. 2019-21.
• Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies Thematic Cluster Grant, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Collaboration with Tony Goldberg (Department of Pathobiological Sciences) and Josh Garoon (Department of Community and Environmental Sociology). 2016-18.
• Mellon Foundation Area and International Studies Research Award for project on “Health, Healing, and Science in Africa.” Collaboration with Claire Wendland (Department of Anthropology) and Pablo Gomez (Medical History and Bioethics). 2013-15.
• Vilas Associate Research Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 2013-15.
• African Studies Association Best Book Prize (formerly known as the Melville J. Herskovits Prize). 2011.

History Courses

• History 277 – Africa: An Introductory Survey
• History 283 – Intermediate Honors Seminar: Health, Healing, and Science in Africa
• History 377 – History of Africa 1500-1875
• History 444 – History of East Africa
• History 600 – The New South Africa: The Challenges of Transition in a Post-Apartheid World
• History 600 – Race and Ethnicity in 20th-Century Africa
• History 751 – Proseminar in African History
• History/Anthropology 774 –  Methods for Research in Non-Literate Societies
• History 861 – Health Medicine and Healing in Africa
• History 861 – History of Health and Healing in Africa
• History 861 – History of South Africa
• History 983 – Health, Disease, and Healing in Africa