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Matthew Heaton

Matthew Heaton, Professor

Matthew Heaton, Associate Professor
Matthew Heaton, Professor

Department of History
409 Major Williams Hall, 220 Stanger St.
Blacksburg, VA 24061
540-231-8361 | mheaton@vt.edu

Matthew Heaton is a professor of history at Virginia Tech. He is currently researching the Nigerian pilgrimage to Mecca in the 20th century. 

  • African Studies - Global Perspective
  • Transnational
  • Health and Migration
  • Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin
  • M.A., University of Texas at Austin
  • B.A., University of Texas at Austin
  • Director of Graduate Studies, 2017-present
  • Project Director, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar: “Race and Mental Health in History and Literature.” 2015-16.
  • Faculty Fellow for Virginia Tech South Atlantic Humanities Program, 2013-14
  • Editor, African Histories and Modernities. Book series. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2013-present Program Committee of African Studies Association, 2010
  • Project Director, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar: “Race and Mental Health in History and Literature.” 2015-16. ($89,424)
  • Virginia Tech Faculty Humanities Fellow, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. Worked with representatives of the University of Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to develop a program of humanities research related to the theme, “Mental Health and Social Change,” 2013-14.
  • Certificate of Teaching Excellence, Virginia Tech, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, 2012-13.

Books

Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013.

A History of Nigeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. (co-authored with Toyin Falola)

Journal Articles

“Elder Dempster and the Transfer of Lunatics in British West Africa.” In Beyond the State: The Colonial Medicine Service in British Africa, edited by Anna Greenwood, pp. 104-25. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.

“Contingencies of Colonial Psychiatry: Migration, Mental Illness, and the Repatriation of Nigerian ‘Lunatics’,” Social History of Medicine 27, no.1. (2014): 41-63.

“Aliens in the Asylum: Immigration and Madness in Gold Coast,” Journal of African History, 54, no.3 (2013): 373-91.

“T.A. Lambo and the Decolonization of Psychiatry in Nigeria.” In Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science in the British Empire 1850-1970, edited by Joseph M. Hodge and Brett Bennett, 275-96. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

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