Robert PECKHAM (Fellow)
Fields of Study:
Histories of medicine and public health focusing on infectious diseases, shifting historical conceptualizations of health and disease, in evolving technologies of surveillance, and the integration of the humanities in clinical education and practice
Profile:
Robert Peckham is MB Lee Professor in the Humanities and Medicine and Department Chair at The Department of History, The University of Hong Kong.
Peckham lectures on the history of medicine and health in the Department of History and in 2010 introduced cross-faculty teaching modules on global histories of disease and public health.
He is a founder and Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine (CHM), a joint initiative of the Faculty of Arts and the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, where he oversees a programme of research projects involving a wide range of disciplines networked to national and international institutions. From 2008-2011 he was Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has also held fellowships at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge and St. Peter's College, Oxford, and he has been the recipient of a Senior Alexander S. Onassis Foundation Fellowship. In 2015, he was King's College London-HKU Fellow, and in 2017-2018 he was Visiting Scholar at New York University. He is editor of the interdisciplinary series Histories and Ecologies of Health, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Research interests and projects:
Robert’s current research focuses on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of infectious disease in modern Asia. An ongoing project examines the repurposing of communication technologies for epidemic surveillance: from the telegraph, telephone and radio, to satellites and aerial robotics ('drones'). He has also written on imperial medicine, colonialism, and the modern state. Informing his research is an interest in space, place, and the securitization of health. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the following research projects:
'Techno-Imperialism and the Origins of Global Health,' supported by a GRF award from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.
'Political Ecologies: Drones and Emerging Infections in Southeast Asia.'
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