| Credits | 1 |
| Restrictions | No 2023 2022 2021 Instr perm req during Drop/Add |
| Pre-Requisites | |
| Co-Requisites | |
| Core Area | |
| Area of Inquiry | Social Relations,Inst.& Agents |
| Liberal Arts Practices |
Faculty Profile for Professor T. Tomlinson
The History of Health, Disease and Empire
A comparative approach to exploring issues of disease, health, and medicine in the context of European imperial projects around the globe. Focusing on the early modern period to the early twentieth century, students trace how global empires facilitated environmental changes and exchanges, as well as the spread of diseases across distant sites. Overseas empire created new health threats through warfare, exploitative labor regimes such as the Atlantic slave system, and global networks of migration and exchange. Further, students study changing understandings of disease and health, as well as health disparities between enslaved and colonized populations, on the one hand, and colonizers, on the other. These disparities had far-reaching geopolitical, economic, and social ramifications, including strongly influencing ideas of race and human difference. One objective is to foster an appreciation of how health and medicine historically have been entangled with formulations of difference and inequality as well as with practices of rule. For instance, who authorities have perceived as threats to public health, and who became subject to intrusive or coercive medical and public health measures reveals how medical thinking has intersected with race, class, and gender—and how it often still does. Students who successfully complete this seminar will receive course credit for HIST 210 and satisfy one half of the social relations, institutions, & agents areas of inquiry requirement.
Tristan Tomlinson is senior lecturer in University Studies and History. He specializes in the histories of early modern Britain and its empire, and is particularly interested in issues of health, population, and interconnections throughout the British Atlantic World.