Prof Christos Lynteris

Prof Christos Lynteris

Director of Research

Professor of Medical Anthropology

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 1994
Email
cl12@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Ground floor
Location
71 North Street

 

Research areas

Christos Lynteris is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the anthropological and historical examination of epidemics with a particular focus on zoonotic diseases, epidemiological epistemology, visual medical culture, and colonial medicine. He is the author of 6 monographs and editor of 8 book volumes at the crossroads of the history and anthropology of medicine.

Professor Lynteris holds the first chair in medical anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Focusing on diseases that spread between animals and humans, his research has been foundational in the establishment of the anthropological study of zoonosis. Combining archival and ethnographic research together with visual methods and critical approaches to medical and epidemiological epistemologies, Professor Lynteris's research seeks to understand how specific zoonotic diseases (e.g. SARS, COVID-19, plague, glanders) and the broader question of zoonosis shape social and multispecies worlds and are in turn shaped by them.

Professor Lynteris is a world-leading scholar of the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that cost over twelve million lives. Focusing on the entanglements between the epistemological and social history of this devastating event, his historical-anthropological approach has opened new vistas into the epistemic and political complexities of scientific understandings of and public health responses to the pandemic across the globe.  

Current Research Projects

Funded by the European Research Council with an Advanced Grant, the project Zoonosis Before Bacteriology (2026-2031, PI Christos Lynteris) will investigate how zoonosis emerged as a scientific and governmental problem between 1770 and 1870 at the crossroads of medicine, pathology, physiology, epidemiology, veterinary medicine and public health. The project will explore how scientific approaches to diseases like rabies, anthrax, glanders and tricinosis as zoonoses before the emergence of bacteriology transformed multispecies relations, forged together modern medicine and governance, and became entanged in colonial and anti-colonial projects in North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Professor Lynteris is Co-I of the UKRI-funded project Improving the Detection of Emerging Zoonotic Pathogens in Forest Fringe Populations. Led by University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust (PI Dr Cyrus Daneshvar) in collaboration with the University of St Andrews, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, and Hasanuddin University, the project will co-develop a decentralised, community-led community-sampling intervention package for fevers in two indigenous forest-fringe communities in Indonesia (Sulawesi) and Malaysia (Sarawak). Prof. Lynteris coordinates and supervises ethnographic research and qualitative social science research for the project in Sarawak and Sulawesi.

Past Research Projects

Funded by the Wellcome Trust with an Investigator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the project The Global War Against the Rat (2019-2025, PI Christos Lynteris) examined how rats became associated with plague in the course of the Third Plague Pandemic. The project exlored global, connected and micro-histories of the development of scientific knowledge around the rat's relation to plague and of public health practices of rat-control. By examining the epistemological, animal, environmental and political histories of knowing and controlling rats as hosts of plague, the project demonstrated how new forms of epidemiological reasoning about zoonosis arose around the epistemic object of the rat.

Funded by the European Research Council with a Starting Grant, the project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic (2013-2018, PI Christos Lynteris)) showed that the emergence of epidemic photography, as a visual genre distinct from medical photography, took place in tresponse to the Third Plague Pandemic. The project explored the role of epidemic photography in the formation of modern understandings and imaginaries of infectious disease epidemics - most crucially involving the formation and dissemination of the concept of the “pandemic”. The project's OA digital database is available via https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/275905

Professor Lynteris was a Co-Investigator of the research project Developing Effective Rodent Control Strategies to Reduce Disease Risk in Ecologically and Culturally Diverse Rural Landscapes (2021-2024) funded by the UKRI/Medical Research Council. The project aimed to reduce risk from rodent-borne plague and leptospirosis in rural Madagascar and Tanzania respectively, and improve public health by fostering local communities' capacity to develop sustainable and resilient rodent-control measures.

Previously, Professor Lynteris's research examined: the epistemic and political afterlives of the SARS pandemic in the People's Republic of China; the formation of socialist medicine in 1940s-1970s China and its synergy and antagonism with Confucian ethics; marmot-hunting practices amongst Mongols and Buryats and their epistemological encolsure within imperial framings of plague in 1890s-1920s Inner Asia.

Before joining St Andrews in 2017, Christos Lynteris was Andrew Mellon and Isaac Newton Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-2013) and ERC Principal Investigator (2013-2017) at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge. He was an affiliated academic member of staff at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Cambridge from 2011 to 2017.

Professor Lynteris has held visiting fellowships at the Centro Incontri Umani (Ascona, 2011), Wolfson College, Cambridge (2011-2013), the Fondation Brocher (Geneva, 2017), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, 2022) and a visiting professorship at the Collège de France (Paris, 2022).

Professor Lynteris is on research leave until August 2030.

Professor Lynteris is accepting PhD students in the fields of medical anthropology and historical anthropology, as well as on topics relating to animal studies, multispecies ethnography, scientific visual culture, and colonial & postcolonial medicine

PhD supervision

  • Jing Liu
  • Maddie Thompson
  • Vlada Vazheyevskyy
  • Zihuan Zhou

Selected publications

 

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