Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Thandeka is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology. Focusing on Africa, she combines history and anthropology to trace the epistemic entanglements of north-south circulations of systems of knowledge production and the attending dynamics of power, inequality, agency and social justice.
Her current project, ‘’Lady Doctors’: women remaking medicine in colonial and postcolonial Africa’ tells the story of women doctor’s working in Africa over the last century as powerful and proactive agents in their societies - as practitioners of medicine, as producers of medical knowledge, and as pioneers. Exploring themes of gender, race, class, colonialism and knowledge production, the project offers a longue durée picture, from 1900 to today, of what it means to be a woman doctor in Africa over time.
Prior to arriving at Oxford, Thandeka was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Wellcome project ‘Cartographies of Cancer: Epidemiologists and Malignancy in sub-Saharan Africa’ at King’s College London. For that project she spearheaded fieldwork at cancer registries in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and South Africa, as well as undertook extensive archival research on the history of African cancer research.
In 2020, she completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge with a thesis on libraries, literacy and children’s stories in rural Malawi. Her research has included work on entanglement, the politics of literature, Early Childhood Development centres in Malawi, indigenous knowledge production, colonial science, African intellectual history, and African health worlds. Her work has appeared in Africa, Social Science and Medicine, The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and Social Studies of Science, among others.
Select Publications
David Reubi and Thandeka Cochrane. 2025. “Cartographic Infrastructures: Geographical pathology, tumour safaris, and colonial networks in British East Africa”, Social Studies of Science, pp. 1-30.
Thandeka Cochrane. 2024. ‘Meshworks, Entanglements and Healthworlds’, in James Cochrane, Gary Gunderson and Teresa Cutts, Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future, Edward Elgar, p. 366-378.
‘Political Stakes of Cancer Podcast’. 2024. With Shagufta Bhangu and Fabien Provost. A 12 episode podcast published on Somatosphere interviewing anthropologists studying cancer across the globe.
Thandeka Cochrane and David Reubi. 2023. ‘Africa, cancer and civilization: a recursive history of progress’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 97, 3, p. 423-455.
Thandeka Cochrane. 2023. ‘The power of stories: Oral storytelling, schooling and onto-epistemologies in rural Malawi’, Oxford Review of Education, 49, 4, p. 478-495.
Thandeka Cochrane. 2022. ‘The politics of literature in Malawi: Filemon Chirwa, Nthanu za Chitonga and the battle for the Atonga Tribal Council’, Africa, 92:5, pp. 819-838.
