Join us in congratulating graduate student Carter Barnett in his Fulbright Award for his research project titled “Beyond Medicine: The Mission Hospitals of Ottoman/Mandatory Palestine, 1850–1950.” As part of the award, he’ll be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working under the mentorship of Dr. Liat Kozma.

Carter’s project investigates how patients, Christian missionaries, and colonial officials used and understood mission hospitals in nineteenth and twentieth-century Palestine. This work builds on existing scholarships in the social history of medicine to incorporate a diversity of historical perspectives beyond medicalization narratives prone to simplification. Rather than solely attributing the proliferation of mission hospitals to medical efficacy or colonial intervention, his project evaluates the paradoxical hospitality of missionary institutions.

Carter’s goals for his time in Israel are two-fold. He told us that “in addition to developing my dissertation project, I will also use my time in Israel to draw on my historical research and collaborate with a team to direct a short documentary exploring hospital care in present-day Nazareth.”