Robbins, Dr Gabrielle

Academic background

Gabrielle joined the African Studies Centre in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and St. Anne’s College in 2025. She previously held a postdoctoral research fellowship in Critical Approaches to Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Her PhD was awarded in 2023 in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also holds a MS from MIT’s HASTS program and an honours BA in Anthropology from Barnard College.

Teaching

Graduate: Gabrielle teaches in the African Studies Centre’s MSc in African Studies. She is currently course convener for the program’s core course on research methods and ethics.

She has previously taught in other positions on medical anthropology, anthropological theory, science and technology studies, global studies of health and environment, medical politics in Africa and the Indian Ocean, and interdisciplinary research methods.

Potential postgraduate students in anthropology and African studies are encouraged to get in touch.

Research interests

Gabrielle’s research explores health and livelihood in Madagascar and the broader East African/western Indian Ocean region amid overlapping socioenvironmental changes. As a historical ethnographer, she is particularly interested in how macro-scalar processes effect everyday life across sectors of Malagasy society. Her current research project examines the shifting politics of medical substances, systems, and logics as they intersect with gendered and racialized dynamics over the 20th and 21st centuries, which she is developing into several publications including her first monograph.

She is also at work on two new projects. The first is a joint effort with Malagasy and American colleagues on the dense politics of bones in central Madagascar. In response to increased bone thefts from family tombs, the project explores how ancestral remains mediate major concerns about personhood, the body, and the family given worsening insecurity. Results will be communicated in an edited volume and planned ethnographic film. The second examines profound changes in Malagasy society catalysed by intensifying cyclones. Through research with environmental justice youth organizations, poets and artists, and health and disaster agencies on the island alongside local communities and international colleagues, this long-term project is broadly concerned with how cyclones and cyclone impacts are known, withstood, mitigated, and represented. All of Gabrielle’s work pursues collaborative experimentation that blends ethnographic, archival, digital, and multi-media methods.

Other interests include the history of anthropology in Africa and the Indian Ocean; genres of ethnographic representation; regional linguistics, art, and creative expression; religious life, especially grassroots Christian movements; internal and transoceanic migration; and long-term processes of multi-cultural connection along the Indian Ocean rim and beyond.

Recent Publications

Robbins, Gabrielle. 2025. “’May Madagascar Live Long and Never Kneel’: Autonomous Medical Industries in Madagascar’s Democratic Republic (1975-1992) and the Politics of Memory.” European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health Special Issue on Socialist Medicine 82:1, p. 282-308. DOI: 10.1163/26667711-bja10052

Robbins, Gabrielle; Alila Brossard Antonelli. 2025. “African Pharmaceuticals.” Oxford Bibliographies. Jacalyn Duffin, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0006

Robbins, Gabrielle; Steven Gonzalez, Jia-Hui Lee, Luísa Reis-Castro, and Julianne Yip. 2020. “World Without Clouds.” Cultural Anthropology: Fieldsights.