Pro Vice-Chancellor (Teaching)
Professor Morag Bell
Professor Morag Bell is the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Teaching). Her research and teaching interests focus on the cultural dynamics of international North/South relations since the late nineteenth century.
These interests have evolved from field-based work on population mobility and environmental change in colonial and postcolonial eastern and southern Africa. They have been expanded by doctoral students and by projects funded by a range of agencies including the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation, the Department for International Development, and the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine.
Current research is linked to a series of debates on cultural imperialism, the spatialities of knowledge and postcolonial modes of enquiry. Three themes provide the focus of her work. The first examines the links between international philanthropy, with its roots in wealthy Northern institutions, and the dynamics of western cultural power during the twentieth century. Her research explores the ways in which philanthropic support for particular cultural technologies, including inquiries into poverty and wellbeing, inform our understanding of the interactions between knowledge and power across the countries of the North and South.
The second theme focuses on ideas of global health and disease in historical and contemporary contexts. It explores the ways in which the mobility of communicable and non-communicable diseases between countries of the North and South inform debates about risk, representation and networks of knowledge. Building on this theme of risk and threat, a third theme examines the links between representations of global climate change and notions of endangered landscapes in the West.