Prof Christos Lynteris awarded grant to study Imperial Endemic Cartographies

Prof Christos Lynteris has been awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to study Imperial Endemic Cartographies.

The two-year collaborative project between Professor Christos Lynteris (St Andrews) and Professor Jacob Steere-Williams (College of Charleston), will examine the development of mapping endemic diseases in the British and French empires in the nineteenth century.

Endemic disease maps were not simply a way of visualizing areas affected by infectious diseases in European colonies, but also technologies for developing, debating and enacting scientific approaches to "disease endemicity". The project’s focus on French and British colonial approaches to disease cartography builds on debates on the visualisation of diseases, which argue that images should not be approached as mere illustrations of scientific studies of infectious diseases, but rather as key agents in knowing and controlling diseases.

The project will compare for the first time the epistemological and governmental impact of "endemic cartographies" developed in the two empires during the nineteenth century and across the bacteriological revolution divide.