Dr Jules Skotnes-Brown
Research Fellow
Research areas
Dr Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of science, medicine, and the environment. His research connects histories of animals, disease, knowledge production, and colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Broadly, he is interested in how science and imperialism have shaped relationships between humans and the environment in colonial contexts, from the control of 'disease reservoirs', to the creation of national parks, to the persecution of animals deemed ‘vermin’. Jules is currently a Research Fellow at University of St Andrews on the Wellcome Trust funded project, The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis. Here he is working on the global history of rats, zoonotic disease, and capitalist infrastructure in the twentieth century. His project explores how the activities of disease-carrying and food-devouring rats have both shaped infrastructures of twentieth-century economies, and how humans have attempted to exclude them from such infrastructures through rat-proofing. Through following the movement of rats across economic networks, his current project charts how and why rats have become despised ‘enemies’ of humankind, and what their mobilities reveal about the entangled histories of zoonosis, colonialism, capitalism, and species invasiveness.
Jules's PhD, completed at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (2017-2020) is a more-than-human history of pests, science, and segregation in 1910s-40s South Africa. His first book, Segregated Species: Boundaries, Pests and Knowledge in South Africa, 1910-48, explores the connections between pest control, racial segregation, and knowledge production in the Union of South Africa. Without equating or anagolizing racialized humans and pest animals, Segregated Species argues that racial segregation, pest control, and the sciences behind them were closely connected in early twentieth-century South Africa. Strategies for the containment of pests were redeployed for the management of humans and vice versa. Settlers blamed racialized populations for the abundance of pests and mobilized metaphors of pestilence to dehumanize them. Even ecological, epidemiological, and zoological knowledge produced about pests was segregated into the binary categories of "native" and "scientific." Black South Africans critiqued such injustices, and some circulated revolutionary rhetoric through images and metaphors of locusts. Ultimately, pest-control practices played an important role in shaping colonial hierarchies of race and species and in mediating relationships among human groups. Segregated Species demonstrates that the history of South Africa—and colonial history generally—cannot be fully understood without analyzing the treatment of both animals and humans.
Selected publications
-
Extracting blood, flies, and ideas: David and Mary Bruce, vernacular experts, and unakane in rural Zululand c. 1880s-1900s
Skotnes-Brown, J., 7 Oct 2024, Rural disease knowledge: anthropological and historical perspectives. da Silva, M. A. D. & Lynteris, C. (eds.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, p. 41-71 31 p.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
-
Open access
Domestication, degeneration and the establishment of the Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa, 1910s-1930s
Skotnes-Brown, J., 4 Feb 2020, (E-pub ahead of print) In: The Historical Journal. First View, p. 1-27 27 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
-
Gerbils without borders: invasiveness, plague, and micro-global histories of science (1932-1939)
Skotnes-Brown, J. & Alves Duarte Da Silva, M., 22 Nov 2024, (Accepted/In press) In: Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
-
Open access
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 › peer-review
-
Introduction: invasive species, global health, and colonial legacies
Skotnes-Brown, J. & Lynteris, C., 22 Nov 2024, (Accepted/In press) In: Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
-
Segregated species: pests, knowledge, and boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948
Skotnes-Brown, J., 30 Jul 2024, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 323 p. (Animals, history, culture)Research output: Book/Report › Book
-
Subterranean swarms: the construction of ‘veld plague’, influx-control, and the war on rodents
Skotnes-Brown, J., 30 Jul 2024, Segregated species: pests, knowledge, and boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948. Skotnes-Brown, J. (ed.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, (Animals, history, culture).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
-
Open access
Emerging infectious diseases and disease emergence: critical, ontological and epistemological approaches
Alves Duarte Da Silva, M. & Skotnes-Brown, J., 28 Sept 2023, In: Isis. 114, S1, p. S26-S49Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
-
Open access
Introduction: Disease reservoirs: from colonial medicine to one health
Alves Duarte Da Silva, M., French, O., Keck, F. & Skotnes-Brown, J., 31 Jul 2023, In: Medical Anthropology. 42, 4, p. 311-324 14 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
-
Open access
Rats, removals, and redevelopment: plague in Port Elizabeth, 1938
Skotnes-Brown, J., 4 Dec 2023, Animals and epidemics: interspecies entanglements in historical perspective. Hüntelmann , A. C., Jaser, C., Roscher, M. & Weber, N. (eds.). Köln: Bohlau Verlag, p. 163-180 18 p. (Tiere in der Geschichte - Animals in history; vol. 2).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter