History Graduate Students

Hannah-Louise Clark's main area of research is the history of science and medicine in the modern Middle East and North Africa.  Focusing on the twentieth-century Maghreb with an emphasis on Algeria, she approaches the history of colonialism and Empire through a global history of medicine, medical education, and pharmaceuticals.  The framework of her research goes beyond the history of elite practitioners and medical discourse, combining perspectives based on global exchanges and local experiences. 

Hannah has presented her work in French and English in a variety of contexts, from the annual meetings of HSS and MESA, to workshops and seminars at Princeton, Harvard, Portsmouth, the Centre d'études maghrébines d'Algérie, and ENS-Cachan.  She is currently teaching in the history department at Princeton (preceptor for Michael Gordin's HIS 292: Science in the Modern World).

Before coming to Princeton, Hannah was a yearlong fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo, Egypt.  She holds a Master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and a BA Hons in Modern History from Oxford (a current c.v. can be found here).  She has just completed two years' archival research in North Africa and France.  She packs and unpacks suitcases often.

Current Project

Hannah's dissertation offers the first historical assessment of medical assistants (auxiliaires médicaux indigènes and adjoints techniques de la Santé publique) in twentieth-century Algeria, using these figures' careers to analyse transformations in the institutions, practices, and ideas of medicine and the colonial state.

Based on French- and Arabic-language archival research and interviews conducted in Algiers, Constantine, Oran, and Tlemcen, as well as French and UK archives and private papers, the project puts recent trends in the global history of medicine into dialogue with work on the colonial state and the social and cultural histories of empire.  Her research has received the support of the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays DDRA programme, Princeton's Institute for International and Regional Studies, and Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbeing.