Dr Matheus Alves Duarte Da Silva

Dr Matheus Alves Duarte Da Silva

Research Fellow

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2018
Email
madds1@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Research areas

I am a historian of medicine and science studying pandemics, emerging infectious diseases, and zoonosis, focusing on Brazil, South America, and global history. After completing my PhD at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (September 2020), I joined the University of St Andrews as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘The Global War against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis’. In the project, I investigate the social and scientific history of rat-catching practices developed in Brazil, the French, British and Portuguese empires during the first half of the twentieth century. I investigate how anti-rat campaigns led to the invention of spatial and ecological concepts, such as disease reservoirs, sylvatic plague and rural plague. I have published articles in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish in the main international journals of my field, including Isis, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Medical Anthropology, Asclepio and Manguinhos. I have co-edited the special issues "Rethinking the History of Microbiology" (History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2024) and "Disease Reservoirs: Anthropological and Historical Approaches" (Medical Anthropology, 2023) and the books “Beyond Science and Empire: Circulation of Knowledge in an Age of Global Empires (1750-1945) (Routledge, 2023)” and “Rural Disease Knowledge: Anthropological and Historical Perspective" (Routledge, 2024). I am currently adapting my thesis into the monograph “When Plague Connected the World: Anew Global History of Microbiology (1890-1920)”.

Selected publications

 

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