HIST 164 - Global Health Histories

How can history help us understand the landscape of global public health today? This “history of the present course” will help you situate contemporary global health topics in a broader historical perspective and show you how skills from the “historian’s toolkit” can be instrumental in helping us build better public health systems. “Global Health Histories” is organized around three topic-focused mini-units. Possible topics include: pandemics; disease control and eradication; racism and health; vaccines and vaccine hesitancy; health and colonialism; international and regional health organizations; Communist health systems; public health in film and literature; family and child health; and the intersections between public health and eugenics and/or population control. In the fourth unit, students will design and execute independent research projects on a topic of their choice. We will devote ample class to developing research and writing skills and we will work intentionally to build a supportive and inclusive scholarly community. We welcome Community and Global Health concentrators, including folks without previous history experience. For History majors, this course meets the global and/or comparative requirement and can count towards the following fields: “Race and Indigeneity;” or “Law and Social Justice,” or “Global/Comparative.”

Alternate years. (4 Credits)