Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Historical Study of Land Use Changes and Emerging Epidemics

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This award supports a doctoral dissertation research project that studies epidemic diseases in the British Empire. The researcher will develop a comparative study of three cities: Belfast, Melbourne, and Bombay. She will focus on the microbe, the colonial administrator, and the bacteriologist as the central actors in each of the three cases. She will do so by engaging in a study of archival documents and other sources to obtain a deeper understanding of the social, economic, and cultural complexities that make each region unique. She plans to show how specific features of the local environment in these three regions, when combined with plans of sanitary improvement and land use change espoused by the British Empire, served to produce unique environments in which particular microbes thrived. The proposed project draws from multiple disciplinary sources and is intended for multiple disciplinary audiences. The researcher plans to disseminate her research results at conferences and workshops sponsored by history departments, epidemiology and public health departments, public health policy centers, and organizations that engage in climate studies.This project uses a historical frame while engaging with a number of central topics in the field of science and technology studies. It engages with the concept of nonhuman agency with its focus on the ecological specificity of microbes, and it uses Niche Construction Theory to access the localized environments and to draw out their relationship to microbial actors. Cultural construction of science and technology, particularly as it relates to imperialism and nineteenth century colonial practices, will also be an important element of consideration to this project. Using relatively new social scientific frameworks to guide this history, this project will engage with STS in its goal to induce new consideration of the agency of living objects and actor-network theory as a viable historical and social scientific frame.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.