Trained at the University of Chicago in poststructuralist theory and the humanities (BA with Honors, 1980) and in African history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (PhD, 1992), Dr. Hunt has been teaching history and African studies at the University of Florida since 2016.
Her project, “Ideation as History: Dream Collectors and Picture Archives from Post-1968 Urban Congo” seeks to join images and words to dreaming in the ex-Belgian Congo. Her approach uses both history and anthropology to consider how text-image links to Congo’s postwar period.
She will use two archives of Congolese-created pictures and text to think about the history of daydreaming, nightmares, childhoods, and dream-collecting within a single post colony. In addition to her archival work, Dr. Hunt will use fieldwork to invite a wide spectrum of Kinshasa residents to read, see, and interpret text-images from the two archival collections. Through investigating pictures, ideations, categories, and borderlines, Dr. Hunt’s research will seek to obliquely engage the emergent, contradictory spaces of “global mental health,” a psychiatric field wending its way into Africa as research and care. To learn more, visit her Guggenheim Fellow Profile.