Histories and Ecologies of Health

Histories and Ecologies of Health

Today, ecological approaches to disease emergence stress the complex nature of species interactions within biological environments. At the same time, health is increasingly viewed as an environmental issue, with disease linked to anthropogenic processes: pollution, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. Histories and Ecologies of Health brings together these two strands of research to examine health as a historical entanglement of the biological, environmental, and social. It aims to advance our understanding of health as a set of imbedded practices and institutions that work across scales—local, regional, global, and planetary—intermeshing bodies with places, humans with nonhumans, and social processes with material contexts.

The chronological scope extends from prehistory to the present, from the past to possible futures. Within this broad temporal sweep, the series considers new works that investigate particular places at specific times, as well as those that adopt more overtly comparative methodologies and trace intercommunity, transnational, and global connections. It encourages novel approaches that cross disciplinary boundaries, providing a unique forum for scholars working on the interstices of medical and health history, the history of science, environmental history, geography, science and technology studies, and anthropology.

Histories and Ecologies of Health invites theoretically innovative and empirically grounded monographs and well-conceived and accessible edited collections that

  • examine the coevolution of knowledge about health and biophysical environments in different settings at different times;
  • study how this nexus has been imagined, visualized, and mapped historically;
  • reconsider health in relation to the coproduction of social worlds with “nature”;
  • investigate the effects of political economies on health and environments; and
  • illuminate the historical interrelationship between health, disease, social networks, and evolving technological systems.

Acquiring Editor: Abby Collier

Editorial Board

  • Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney)
  • Diana K. Davis (University of California, Davis)
  • Rohan D’Souza (Kyoto University)
  • Paul Wenzel Geissler (University of Oslo)
  • Stephen Hinchliffe (University of Exeter)
  • Susan D. Jones (University of Minnesota)
  • Frédéric Keck (CNRS, Paris)
  • Alex M. Nading (Cornell University)
  • Christopher Otter (Ohio State University)
  • Carolyn Roberts (Yale University)

 

Series Editor

Robert PeckhamUniversity of Hong Kong

Robert Peckham is the MB Lee Professor in the Humanities and Medicine and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. He has written widely on the history of medicine and health, with a particular focus on the interplay of social and biological ecologies in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Recent publications include the book Epidemics in Modern Asia, which explores epidemics as local and transnational phenomena across modern Asia, and the edited volumes Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties and Disease and Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health.

Robert Peckham