Robert Peckham
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 331657 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Robert Peckham |
| PRENOMES | Robert |
| SOBRENOME | Peckham |
| ASSINATURA | PECKHAM R |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8370-609X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 24 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 58 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1996 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Diseasing the City
Modern Flu
Epidemic Histories in East Asia
This paper provides an overview of recent literature on the history of epidemics in East Asia, with a primary focus on modern and contemporary China, but including some discussion of the scholarship in English on epidemics in Korea and Japan. Key research strands are identified within the field: local and regional histories, disease biographies, histories of public health campaigns, global connections, and cultural representations. The paper argu…
Epidemics in the Past and Now
I'd like to open our discussion by asking how (if at all) COVID-19 reshapes our historical understanding of epidemics and pandemics in the colonial past. Do you think that the present pandemic has a specifically colonial relevance or resonances?DA: This is a big and, to my mind, fascinating question as it goes to the heart not just of what we as historians make of the present pandemic but of our role as historians, and especially as historians de…
The Crisis of Crisis
Writing in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, historian Charles Rosenberg suggested that epidemics furnished "useful sampling devices" for examining "fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice." This paper reconsiders Rosenberg's seminal essay and the central question it addresses-what is an epidemic?-from the vantage of a historian in Hong Kong working on colonial and postcolonial Asia in th…
A Modern Contagion
Reviewed by: A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera by Amir A. Afkhami Robert Peckham Amir A. Afkhami. A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xiv + 276 pp. Ill. $54.95 (978-1-4214-2721-8). From 1817, a cholera epidemic that began in Bengal diffused across much of the Indian Subcontinent and along the proliferating pathways of …
Viral surveillance and the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic
This article traces the diffusion of the 1968 Hong Kong influenza pandemic against the backdrop of scientific and global health developments, a global wave of social protests, and Cold War tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Although the outbreak was far less severe than the 1918–19 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic, the ease with which influenza spread globally between 1968 and 1970 contributed to a reformulation of…
The Chronopolitics of Covid-19
This paper examines the temporal politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that despite the emphasis on digital real-time coverage and epidemiological forecasting, the pandemic has been understood as a historical event, even as it has been unfolding. The paper considers the implications of this ambiguous temporality, suggesting that COVID-19 has made visible a new heterotemporality, wherein real time, history, and the future intermesh. The paper…
L iping B u . Public Health and the Modernization of China, 1865–2015
In recent years there has been increasing scholarly interest in tracing China’s medical and health history, in part to understand how China has got from collectivization to where it is today: a country with an unevenly marketized domestic health-care landscape and glaring disparities between urban and rural communities, rich and poor, and a state that is making biomedical and tech innovation a cornerstone of its self-image. Of course, many of the…
Chieko Nakajima. Body, Society, and Nation
In Body, Society, and Nation, Chieko Nakajima sets out to explore “the complexity and plurality of China’s unfolding modernity” (p.1) by tracking the evolution of health as a social, political, and economic concern in Republican Shanghai. Although the book reaches back to the nineteenth century and considers post-1949 China by way of conclusion, its primary focus is on the 1920s through the 1940s. As Nakajima points out at the outset, while Shang…
Anarchitectures of health
In recent years, research on the military deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, has proliferated. However, to date there has been little systematic study of how drones are being used for health surveillance and management, particularly in resource-constrained settings. In this paper, we draw on a number of case studies to explore how the biomedical drone is contributing to a re-spatialization of health and to a process of data…
Infectious Change
Reviewed by: Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic by Katherine A. Mason Robert Peckham Katherine A. Mason. Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016. xiii + 252 pp. Ill. $27.95 ( 9780804798921). Fourteen years after the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the memory of SARS has begun to fade. In Hong Kong, students born in …
Satellites and the New War on Infection
Epidemics in Modern Asia
Epidemics have played a critical role in shaping modern Asia. Encompassing two centuries of Asian history, Robert Peckham explores the profound impact that infectious disease has had on societies across the region: from India to China and the Russian Far East. The book tracks the links between biology, history, and geopolitics, highlighting infectious disease's interdependencies with empire, modernization, revolution, nationalism, migration, and …
Critical Mass
Epidemics in Modern Asia
Polio, terror and the immunological worldview
This paper adopts a socio-historical perspective to explore when, how and why the eradication of poliomyelitis has become politicised to the extent that health workers and security personnel are targeted in drive-by shootings. Discussions of the polio crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan have tended to focus on Taliban suspicions of a US-led public health intervention and the denunciation of 'modernity' by Islamic 'extremists'. In contrast, this pa…
Hong Kong Junk
Histories of the Third Plague Pandemic, which diffused globally from China in the 1890s, have tended to focus on colonial efforts to regulate the movement of infected populations, on the state’s draconian public health measures, and on the development of novel bacteriological theories of disease causation. In contrast, this article focuses on the plague epidemic in Hong Kong and examines colonial preoccupations with Chinese “things” as sources of…
Bridie Andrews. The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960
Histories of medicine across colonial Asia—from British India to the U.S. Philippines, French Indochina to Japanese Taiwan—have tended to accentuate the antagonistic relationship between Western medicine and indigenous healing practices. The emphasis in much of this scholarship has been on how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century imperial interests were bolstered by medical and public health institutions, which functioned as critical tools for…
Hygienic Nature
This article examines the 'greening' of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's 'barren' mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to 'sanitize' Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the h…
Infective Economies
The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubon…
Economies of contagion
The outbreak of an influenza A (H1N1) pandemic in 2009 coincided with a severe global financial downturn (2007–8). This paper examines the use of ‘contagion’ as a model for assessing the dynamics of both episodes: the spread of infection and the diffusion of shock through an intrafinancial system. The argument is put that a discourse of globally ‘emerging’ and ‘re-emerging’ infection helped to shape a theory of financial contagion, which develope…
The uncertain state of islands
Map mania
Between East and West
Events have anew directed attention to those frontier lands of Eastern Europe where diverse races, professing conflicting faiths, meet and mingle, and where for centuries rival empires have contended for ascendency. 1
Economies of contagion
The outbreak of an influenza A (H1N1) pandemic in 2009 coincided with a severe global financial downturn (2007–8). This paper examines the use of ‘contagion’ as a model for assessing the dynamics of both episodes: the spread of infection and the diffusion of shock through an intrafinancial system. The argument is put that a discourse of globally ‘emerging’ and ‘re-emerging’ infection helped to shape a theory of financial contagion, which develope…
The uncertain state of islands
Hygienic Nature
This article examines the 'greening' of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's 'barren' mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to 'sanitize' Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the h…
Map mania
Viral surveillance and the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic
This article traces the diffusion of the 1968 Hong Kong influenza pandemic against the backdrop of scientific and global health developments, a global wave of social protests, and Cold War tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Although the outbreak was far less severe than the 1918–19 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic, the ease with which influenza spread globally between 1968 and 1970 contributed to a reformulation of…
Epidemics in the Past and Now
I'd like to open our discussion by asking how (if at all) COVID-19 reshapes our historical understanding of epidemics and pandemics in the colonial past. Do you think that the present pandemic has a specifically colonial relevance or resonances?DA: This is a big and, to my mind, fascinating question as it goes to the heart not just of what we as historians make of the present pandemic but of our role as historians, and especially as historians de…
The Chronopolitics of Covid-19
This paper examines the temporal politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that despite the emphasis on digital real-time coverage and epidemiological forecasting, the pandemic has been understood as a historical event, even as it has been unfolding. The paper considers the implications of this ambiguous temporality, suggesting that COVID-19 has made visible a new heterotemporality, wherein real time, history, and the future intermesh. The paper…
Infective Economies
The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubon…
Satellites and the New War on Infection
Between East and West
Events have anew directed attention to those frontier lands of Eastern Europe where diverse races, professing conflicting faiths, meet and mingle, and where for centuries rival empires have contended for ascendency. 1
Between East and West
Events have anew directed attention to those frontier lands of Eastern Europe where diverse races, professing conflicting faiths, meet and mingle, and where for centuries rival empires have contended for ascendency. 1
Map mania
The uncertain state of islands
Infective Economies
The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubon…
Economies of contagion
The outbreak of an influenza A (H1N1) pandemic in 2009 coincided with a severe global financial downturn (2007–8). This paper examines the use of ‘contagion’ as a model for assessing the dynamics of both episodes: the spread of infection and the diffusion of shock through an intrafinancial system. The argument is put that a discourse of globally ‘emerging’ and ‘re-emerging’ infection helped to shape a theory of financial contagion, which develope…
Bridie Andrews. The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960
Histories of medicine across colonial Asia—from British India to the U.S. Philippines, French Indochina to Japanese Taiwan—have tended to accentuate the antagonistic relationship between Western medicine and indigenous healing practices. The emphasis in much of this scholarship has been on how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century imperial interests were bolstered by medical and public health institutions, which functioned as critical tools for…
Hygienic Nature
This article examines the 'greening' of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's 'barren' mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to 'sanitize' Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the h…
Epidemics in Modern Asia
Epidemics have played a critical role in shaping modern Asia. Encompassing two centuries of Asian history, Robert Peckham explores the profound impact that infectious disease has had on societies across the region: from India to China and the Russian Far East. The book tracks the links between biology, history, and geopolitics, highlighting infectious disease's interdependencies with empire, modernization, revolution, nationalism, migration, and …
Critical Mass
Epidemics in Modern Asia
Polio, terror and the immunological worldview
This paper adopts a socio-historical perspective to explore when, how and why the eradication of poliomyelitis has become politicised to the extent that health workers and security personnel are targeted in drive-by shootings. Discussions of the polio crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan have tended to focus on Taliban suspicions of a US-led public health intervention and the denunciation of 'modernity' by Islamic 'extremists'. In contrast, this pa…
Hong Kong Junk
Histories of the Third Plague Pandemic, which diffused globally from China in the 1890s, have tended to focus on colonial efforts to regulate the movement of infected populations, on the state’s draconian public health measures, and on the development of novel bacteriological theories of disease causation. In contrast, this article focuses on the plague epidemic in Hong Kong and examines colonial preoccupations with Chinese “things” as sources of…
Infectious Change
Reviewed by: Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic by Katherine A. Mason Robert Peckham Katherine A. Mason. Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016. xiii + 252 pp. Ill. $27.95 ( 9780804798921). Fourteen years after the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the memory of SARS has begun to fade. In Hong Kong, students born in …
Satellites and the New War on Infection
Anarchitectures of health
In recent years, research on the military deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, has proliferated. However, to date there has been little systematic study of how drones are being used for health surveillance and management, particularly in resource-constrained settings. In this paper, we draw on a number of case studies to explore how the biomedical drone is contributing to a re-spatialization of health and to a process of data…
L iping B u . Public Health and the Modernization of China, 1865–2015
In recent years there has been increasing scholarly interest in tracing China’s medical and health history, in part to understand how China has got from collectivization to where it is today: a country with an unevenly marketized domestic health-care landscape and glaring disparities between urban and rural communities, rich and poor, and a state that is making biomedical and tech innovation a cornerstone of its self-image. Of course, many of the…
Chieko Nakajima. Body, Society, and Nation
In Body, Society, and Nation, Chieko Nakajima sets out to explore “the complexity and plurality of China’s unfolding modernity” (p.1) by tracking the evolution of health as a social, political, and economic concern in Republican Shanghai. Although the book reaches back to the nineteenth century and considers post-1949 China by way of conclusion, its primary focus is on the 1920s through the 1940s. As Nakajima points out at the outset, while Shang…
The Crisis of Crisis
Writing in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, historian Charles Rosenberg suggested that epidemics furnished "useful sampling devices" for examining "fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice." This paper reconsiders Rosenberg's seminal essay and the central question it addresses-what is an epidemic?-from the vantage of a historian in Hong Kong working on colonial and postcolonial Asia in th…
A Modern Contagion
Reviewed by: A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera by Amir A. Afkhami Robert Peckham Amir A. Afkhami. A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xiv + 276 pp. Ill. $54.95 (978-1-4214-2721-8). From 1817, a cholera epidemic that began in Bengal diffused across much of the Indian Subcontinent and along the proliferating pathways of …
Viral surveillance and the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic
This article traces the diffusion of the 1968 Hong Kong influenza pandemic against the backdrop of scientific and global health developments, a global wave of social protests, and Cold War tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Although the outbreak was far less severe than the 1918–19 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic, the ease with which influenza spread globally between 1968 and 1970 contributed to a reformulation of…
The Chronopolitics of Covid-19
This paper examines the temporal politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that despite the emphasis on digital real-time coverage and epidemiological forecasting, the pandemic has been understood as a historical event, even as it has been unfolding. The paper considers the implications of this ambiguous temporality, suggesting that COVID-19 has made visible a new heterotemporality, wherein real time, history, and the future intermesh. The paper…
Epidemics in the Past and Now
I'd like to open our discussion by asking how (if at all) COVID-19 reshapes our historical understanding of epidemics and pandemics in the colonial past. Do you think that the present pandemic has a specifically colonial relevance or resonances?DA: This is a big and, to my mind, fascinating question as it goes to the heart not just of what we as historians make of the present pandemic but of our role as historians, and especially as historians de…
Epidemic Histories in East Asia
This paper provides an overview of recent literature on the history of epidemics in East Asia, with a primary focus on modern and contemporary China, but including some discussion of the scholarship in English on epidemics in Korea and Japan. Key research strands are identified within the field: local and regional histories, disease biographies, histories of public health campaigns, global connections, and cultural representations. The paper argu…
Modern Flu
Diseasing the City
History (17 obras) · Political science (17 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Medicine (11 obras) · Politics (11 obras) · Sociology (11 obras) · Geography (10 obras) · Ancient history (9 obras) · China (9 obras) · Colonialism (8 obras)