Date: 10 April 2018
Time: 4:30pm
Venue: Room 10.66, 10/F Run Run Shaw Tower Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

Speaker: Prof. James L.A. Webb Jr. (Colby College)

Abstract:
New perspectives from the biological sciences and from environmental history have opened new avenues through which to explore the histories of contemporary disease challenges. The emerging subfield of historical epidemiology - the study of the impacts of efforts to control disease over time and the ways in which interventions have transformed patterns of disease and influenced disease transmission - will demand approaches that integrate several domains of knowledge. What hurdles will need to be surmounted? What role, if any, should medical historians take on? What are the promises and pitfalls of historical epidemiology?

About the speaker:
Prof. James L.A. Webb Jr. is Research Professor at Colby College in Maine. He is a specialist in the historical epidemiology of infectious disease whose research integrates evidence from the biological sciences and the social sciences to develop historical perspectives that are useful to practitioners and planners in global public health. Recent book publications include The Long Struggle Against Malaria in Tropical Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Global Health in Africa: Historical Perspectives on Disease Control, co-edited with Tamara Giles-Vernick, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013). He is currently working on a global epidemiology of human waste and infectious intestinal disease.

All welcome. Enquiries: contact_chm@hku.hk

This event is co-organized with the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.