Research areas
Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of science. His research connects histories of animals, disease, knowledge production, and colonialism in the nineteeth and twentieth centuries. He is currently a Research Fellow in the History of Rat Proofing working on the Wellcome Trust funded project 'The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis'. Here he will be investigating entangled histories of rodents, pestilence, zoonosis, space and architecture in a cross-comparative framework between South Africa, British India, the USA, and Argentina in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.
Jules's PhD, completed at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (2017-2020) charted the construction of physical and conceptual boundaries between human and animal, wild and domestic, protected and pest, and the consequences of crossing such boundaries in South Africa (1910s-1940s). With case studies spanning elephants, birdlife, tsetse-flies, and wild-rodents, it examined how wildlife was commodified, categorised, conserved, or exterminated on rural inner-frontiers, and how spheres of ?nature? and ?civilisation? were constructed and reconciled. In particular, it emphasised how forms of knowledge typically considered outside of science such as African expertise intermingled with the sciences, but necessarily complicated the boundaries between them. Likewise, it demonstrated the influence of nonhuman agents in the sciences and on the environment, without de-emphasising the destructive and dehumanising role played by European humans in southern African history.
Selected publications
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Domestication, degeneration and the establishment of the Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa, 1910s-1930s
Skotnes-Brown, J., 4 Feb 2020, In : The Historical Journal. First View, p. 1-27 27 p.Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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Wildness and Domesticity: The Addo Elephant National Park in early 20th century South Africa
Skotnes-Brown, J., 20 Feb 2020, OnlineResearch output: Other contribution
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Colonized Play: Racism, sexism, and colonial legacies in the Dota 2 South Africa Community
Skotnes-Brown, J., 17 May 2019, Video Games and the Global South. ETC Press, p. 143-154 291 p.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding ? Chapter
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From the white man?s grave to the white man?s home? Experiencing ?tropical Africa? at the 1924-1925 British Empire Exhibition
Skotnes-Brown, J., 20 Mar 2019, In : Science Museum Group Journal. Spring 2019, 11, 28 p.Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article