Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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Water Marginalised?

October 26, 2021

Water can produce both favourable and unfavourable health outcomes. As this has been well known since the mid-nineteenth century, the following question arises: why did many polities across the world struggle to commit to improving water supplies and sanitation in the twentieth century? My research explores how the marginalisation of water within the fragmentary structures of imperial and international policy making shaped commitment (or lack thereof) to developing water supplies and sanitation facilities in twentieth-century Africa. By exploring how administrators and scientists did or did not conceptualise water as a key public health issue—and how this framing shaped imperial, colonial, national, and international health policy—we can better understand water's marginalisation in twentieth century health discourses. Researching at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), I sought to better understand the role of Rockefeller Foundation, Near East Foundation, and Ford Foundation officials and associates in conceptualising the relationship between water and health, and between water and development, particularly in relation to the Sudan and Uganda. This report will focus primarily on the work of Rockefeller Foundation officials and associate researchers between c. 1925 and 1940. It also draws from papers held by officials and associate researchers, which were written for, or on behalf of, the League of Nations Health Organisation or the British Colonial Office.

Ford Foundation; Interwar Years; Nelson C. Davis Papers; Public Health; Rockefeller Foundation

Researching Uganda's national parks at the RAC

January 1, 2016

My research at the Rockefeller Archive Center was conducted for my doctoral thesis which examines the history of the northern lowlands of Uganda's Albertine Rift Valley since the mid-nineteenth century. This area, which roughly corresponds to the modern-day district of Buliisa, has recently come to national and international attention as the location of some of the largest onshore crude oil fields discovered in Africa in the last few decades. Since the discoveries were made in 2006, conflict and tensions have arisen between and among communities, the state, and multi-national oil companies, over land, compensation and the anticipated revenues from the exploitation of this resource. But the lowlands have long been a site of struggle between different actors. It has for some time been the focus of particularly palpable, virulent, nervous and defensive strain of ethnic nativism. My thesis is a historical exploration of the ontological insecurity that has historically driven ethnic nativism and has itself been fuelled by ambiguity over ethnic self-identification and belonging in the valley. This study explores why this marginal place and the social identifications of the peoples who live there have become sites of unusually intense struggle.

Placing Global Science in Africa: International Networks, Local Places, and Virus Research in Uganda, 1936-2012

January 1, 2013

In 1936 representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division (IHD) moved into the former premises of a sleeping sickness research laboratory on the shores of Lake Victoria in Entebbe, Uganda and established the Yellow Fever Research Institute (YFRI). Almost eighty years later, the original laboratory building still stands at the heart of the sprawling campus of the Uganda Virus Research Institute and several of its collaborators, including the United Kingdom Medical Research Council (MRC), the Rakai Health Sciences Program, the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). My dissertation explores the history of virus research based at this institute through three case studies. These case studies are the Rockefeller Foundation's (RF) yellow fever research from 1936 until 1950, the Institute's work on Burkitt's lymphoma between 1962 and 1979, and the HIV/AIDS research of the Rakai Health Sciences Program (RHSP) in partnership with the UVRI from 1986 until the present. By looking at changes and continuities in the people, places, and things connected to research at the Institute at different moments in time, the project will contribute to a better understanding of the practices and relationships that have characterized international and global health research over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

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