Conserving Global Health

Jules Skotnes-Brown is an award-winning historian of the environment, science, and health, interested in histories of animals, disease, knowledge production, and colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the project he will examine how conservation became a strategy of zoonotic disease prevention, and how conservation shaped the formulation of a new medical reasoning: that “wild” areas were sites of innumerable undetected pathogens that should be left undisturbed by human activities for the sake of global biosecurity.

Katherine Arnold is a historian of the German, British, and Dutch empires, the history of science and the environment, and global history, interested primarily in botanical collecting and collections in imperial contexts in the long nineteenth century. As part of the project, she will investigate how different African plant and landscape ecosystems - like the Cape Floristic Region, the Namib Desert, and the Serengeti - came to be understood as 'biodiverse' spaces and, ultimately, significant conservation priorities in the twentieth century. Likewise, she will explore how plants and deforestation factored into early understandings of human and animal diseases like African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), as well as the role of plants like succulents, aloes, and grasses as important carbon sinks.

Perseverence Madhuku is a historian of health and medicine interested in histories of disease, the environment, knowledge production, and lived experiences of health interventions in twentieth-century southern Africa. For this project, she will investigate how domestic animal diseases, specifically African animal trypanosomiasis (AAT), became entangled with species conservation, tracing the consequences for the health of Indigenous communities and their animals. She will also explore how research on animal diseases conducted in the region circulated globally and shaped broader histories of zoonoses, international health, and global conservation.