Henry Llewellyn joined the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine as a Wellcome Trust Fellow in 2023. Previously, he was a Senior Research Fellow at University College London. While at UCL, Henry co-founded and co-convened the Qualitative Health Research Network. He holds a PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCL during which he was a visiting researcher at Yale University.

Henry’s research explores how medical knowledge is produced and standardised, how it travels, and how it shapes people’s lives and work around the world. He has also written (with Ignacia Arteaga) on the ethics of conducting highly immersive ethnographies with people who are seriously ill. Henry’s work has been supported by the Wellcome Trust, Macmillan Cancer Support, and UCL. It has appeared in Ethos, Medical Anthropology, Social Science & Medicine, and Sociology of Health & Illness. Henry has also contributed to a number of edited volumes, including most recently Impermanence: Exploring continuous change across cultures, edited by Haidy Geismar, Ton Otto, and Cameron David Warner (UCL Press, 2022).

Research

• Biomedical and life sciences
• Cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa Care

Henry’s current Wellcome-funded research explores brain tumour diagnosis and care in Sub-Saharan Africa and how it intersects with international cancer classification. Taking a multi-sited ethnographic approach, he focuses on three principal things: 1) the “on-the-ground realities” of brain tumour diagnosis and care in Uganda, South Africa and Nigeria; 2) the development of WHO cancer classifications; and 3) collaborations among brain tumour practitioners and advocates across Sub-Saharan Africa who are finding ways to harness collective experience, expertise and resources in the pursuit of better care. Henry has the great fortune to be conducting this recent work in collaboration with colleagues at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Stellenbosch University, University of Ibadan, Harvard University, the WHO and UCL.

PhD Supervision

Henry is happy to supervise students with similar research interests/expertise.