Dr Markku Hokkanen
Markku Hokkanen was born in Lieksa and educated at the Rauhala High School and the University of Jyväskylä (PhD, History, University of Jyväskylä 2006). For his doctoral and post-doctoral work, he carried out research in Malawi, Scotland and England, affiliated to universities of Malawi, Strathclyde, Edinburgh and Oxford Brookes. Between 2008 and 2010 he was an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2011-2015 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä, Department of History and Ethnology.
Since 2016, Hokkanen has worked as a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Oulu. His research and teaching interests include the cultural, social and intellectual history of medicine, health and Christianity, African history, imperial and colonial history, histories of mobilities, knowledge and expertise, and historical methodology. Geographically, Hokkanen’s work has focused on South-Central Africa and the British Empire. He has led major Academy of Finland and Kone Foundation research projects on histories of medicine, healing, politics and development, and is now leading a Kone Foundation-funded project on the global history of Finnish forestry expertise after the Second World War. He is currently planning a book on medical mobilities within the late British Empire in Africa, collaborative works on African and imperial history in Finnish, and a historiographical study of the history of “others” in the late twentieth century. Since 2024, Hokkanen has been a member of the governing board of the Finnish Historical Society.
Select publications
Monographs:
- Medicine, mobility and the empire: Nyasaland networks, 1859–1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press, Studies in Imperialism, 2017.
- Medicine and Scottish Missionaries in the Northern Malawi Region, 1875–1930: Quests for Health in a Colonial Society .Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007.
Edited collections:
- Markku Hokkanen, Philip J. Havik, Benson Mulemi & Musa Sadock (eds.), Healers and Politics in African History (Forthcoming, in press, Manchester University Press, Social Histories of Medicine-series)
- Markku Hokkanen & Kalle Kananoja, eds., Healers and Empires in Global History: Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge in Global History. Palgrave MacMillan, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series , 2019.
Journal articles and book chapters:
- ‘From Heroic Exploration to Careful Control: Mobility, Health, and Medicine in the British African Empire’ in Sandra Dinter & Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, eds., Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, 2023, 259–279. Open access.
- ‘The Government Medical Service and British Missions in Colonial Malawi, c. 1891–1940: Crucial Collaboration, Hidden Conflicts’, in A. Greenwood (ed.), Beyond the State: The Colonial Medical Service in British Africa. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015, 39–63. Open access.
- ‘Imperial Networks, Colonial Bioprospecting and Burroughs Wellcome & Co.: The Case of Strophanthus Kombe from Malawi (1859–1915)’. Social History of Medicine, Vol.25, No. 3, August 2012, 589–607.
