Conference: MARC BLOCH SCHOOL OF LECTURES ‘Investigating the frontiers of epidemics: science, history, social sciences’.
Location and date: 21 May 2024, at 5pm – Campus Condorcet Centre de colloques, Auditorium 150 Aubervilliers
Registration link (Open to all, followed by a cocktail reception) : https://formulaires.demarches.ehess.fr/com/conference-d-anne-rasmussen-enquetes-aux-frontieres-des-epidemies-sciences-histoire-sciences-sociales/
Anne Rasmussen, historian at EHESS and director of the Centre Alexandre-Koyré (CAK), will be giving a lecture on Tuesday 21 May 2024 at 5pm at the Condorcet Campus, entitled ‘ Enquêtes aux frontières des épidémies : sciences, histoire, sciences sociales ‘. This lecture is part of the Marc Bloch lecture series organised by EHESS to promote dialogue between the social sciences and the experimental sciences.
Investigating the frontiers of epidemics: science, history, social sciences
The history of the production of knowledge about epidemics highlights the diversity of forms of dialogue that have taken place over time between the natural sciences and the social sciences.
Focusing on these encounters between disciplines that take the understanding of pathological phenomena and their circulation as their object, this lecture will look at three moments in the recomposition of knowledge regimes on epidemics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
- In the 1830s, during the incursion of cholera into Europe, medical controversies over the nature of the disease mobilised geography and social knowledge to turn the national border into a tool for governing public health;
- At the dawn of the 20th century, as typhoid fever reigned in urban areas, bacteriology invented the figure of the germ carrier, who shifted the boundaries of contagion from the distant to the neighbouring, developing new knowledge of society;
- In the aftermath of the Spanish flu pandemic in the 1920s and 1930s, the new ecology of disease placed the environment and interactions between humans, animals, plants and vectors at the heart of research. It took over the colonial field and involved epidemiology, botany, population ecology and anthropology.
These historical surveys question the issues at stake in these renewed dialogues between the biological and the social.
Anne Rasmussen, historian of modern and contemporary worlds
A historian, Anne Rasmussen conducts her research into the social history of health and biomedical knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at the Centre Alexandre-Koyré (CAK – EHESS, CNRS, MNHN), which she has headed since 2019.
Her recent work focuses on the relationship between population medicine, war and health crises, as part of her studies at EHESS entitled ‘Sciences, medicine and territories: a social and political history, nineteenth to twenty-first centuries’. She was scientific curator of the exhibition ‘Face aux épidémies. De la peste noire à nos jours’ at the National Archives (2022-2023).
Thinking and living interdisciplinarity at Campus Condorcet
Following the presentation by Svante Pääbo, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, at the conférence annuelle Marc Bloch de l’EHESS in November 2023, Anne Rasmussen will be speaking on 21 May 2024 at the Campus Condorcet (Aubervilliers). She will return to a subject that has been at the heart of debate since the Covid-19 pandemic: epidemics, in a lecture entitled ‘Investigating the frontiers of epidemics: science, history, social sciences’.
This event is part of a new cycle of Marc Bloch lectures dedicated in 2024 to interdisciplinarity, which, like the annual Marc Bloch lectures that EHESS has been organising since 1979, perpetuates ‘a dialogue with other disciplines to ensure that science is not limited to a specific field, the social sciences or the experimental sciences, but is instead open to a fruitful dialogue for understanding human societies’, according to Romain Huret, President of EHESS. This fifth lecture follows those given by science historian Claudine Cohen, anthropologist Philippe Descola, Assyriologist Grégory Chambon and historian Silvia Sebastiani.
By organising this event at the Campus Condorcet, EHESS is pursuing its objective of interdisciplinary dialogue and openness to society and the territory.
For more information: recommended reading :
Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground, Tom Koch, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011
Face aux épidémies. De la peste noire à nos jours, Anne Rasmussen, Archives nationales-Michel Lafon, Paris, 2022
« La grippe : un problème pour l’action sanitaire internationale, 1889-1930 », in Soraya Boudia et Emmanuel Henry (dir.), La mondialisation des risques. Une histoire politique et transnationale des risques sanitaires et environnementaux, Anne Rasmussen Presses universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2015
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