For the Right to Health: A History of Science and Solidarity
A monograph book project
Public health or commercial medicine? The same advances that could open possibilities for the many could also be reserved for the few. For the Right to Health reveals the politics inherent in this choice: given new capabilities, healthcare can become part of citizenship, or part of capitalism.
Stuck as we are in a beleaguered present, we might not see such basic choices for what they are: choices. Treating healthcare as history enables us to see what became possible when, how specific people reacted, and how we might yet choose a far better path.
The stories of ordinary people, scientists, caregivers, and politicians help us to understand how politics shaped personal experiences of illness, and disease transformed politics, from the Black Death to the present. Where could you turn for help when you were sick in different times and places? What care was available, what were your rights? And how did people profit from medicine and healthcare?
History of Political Life in Ukraine
Co-authored with Timothy Snyder, supported by the Ukrainian History Global Initiative
Political life in Ukraine is of extraordinary age and diversity on the scale of the entire globe. Indeed, several major developments in world political history have their point of origin in Ukraine. To search for political life in Ukraine is to return to what was known and understood of history by past Ukrainian political thinkers, and complement it with what has recently been discovered.
History of Infectious Disease in Ukraine
Essay, co-authored with John McNeill, supported by the Ukrainian History Global Initiative
Ukraine has been a crossroads during pandemics, and home to discoveries that revolutionized medicine and transformed human life. The black earth of Ukraine inspired the first effective cure for tuberculosis, and Ukraine both suffered one of the last European outbreaks of the plague and produced the scientist who created the first vaccine against the disease. Ukraine’s place in the history of infectious disease is at once utterly typical of interactions between pathogens and human society, and globally transformative.
Displacement and Disease: The History of Immigration and Health in Making the Modern World
A monograph book project
This project takes the health of displaced persons after the Second World War as a starting point for a new exploration of the relationship between the politics of immigration, healthcare, and welfare. Hundreds of thousands of displaced persons experienced longterm physical and mental health conditions following the Second World War. Far more cases went undocumented. This reality largely vanished into a narrative of individual and national resilience and recovery. Yet, healing from the physical and psychological traumas of the war was a long and often unfinished process that shaped understandings of disability and healthcare in modern society, as well as national recovery, postwar social policy under disparate political regimes, and the growth of international organizations.
