University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts / Department of History / Staff / Academic staff

Professor Warwick H. Anderson

M.B.B.S., B.Med.Sc., M.D. (Melbourne)
M.A., Ph.D. (Pennsylvania)
Room 837 Brennan-MacCallum Building

+61 2 9351 3365

Warwick H. Anderson holds an appointment as Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of History and the Center for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. Additionally, he has an affiliation with the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney and is a Professorial Fellow of the Centre for Health and Society at the University of Melbourne.

As an historian of biology, medicine and public health, focusing on Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the United States, Dr. Anderson is especially interested in ideas about race, human difference, and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Occasionally he writes programmatically on postcolonial science studies and, more generally, on science and globalization.

Before moving to Sydney, Dr. Anderson was Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health, Professor of the History of Science, and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At Wisconsin he also served on the steering committee of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and was a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Previously he taught at Harvard, Melbourne (where he founded the Centre for Health and Society), UCSF and Berkeley. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (US), and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2005-06, he was the Frederick Burkhardt Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In February 2007, he was the inaugural Wellcome Senior Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation named Warwick Anderson a Fellow for 2007-08.

Research areas

  • History of science, medicine, and public health
  • History of racial thought
  • Postcolonial science studies

Research projects

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Selected publications

Books

  • The Collectors of Lost Souls: Kuru, Moral Peril, and the Creation of Value in Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; 2008.
  • Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham NC: Duke University Press; 2006; and Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press; 2007.
  • The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press; 2002; and New York: Basic Books; 2003. Reprinted MUP, 2005; Duke University Press, 2006. [W.K. Hancock Award (Australian Historical Association) and inaugural Basic Books Award]

Special Issue of Journal

  • [With Gabrielle Hecht] “Postcolonial technoscience.” Social Studies of Science. 2002; 32, no. 5-6.

Articles

  • "Indigenous health in a global frame: from community development to human
    rights." Health and History 2008; 10:2 94-108.
  • "Early perceptions of an epidemic." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
    Society B    . 2008; 363: 3675-3678.
  • “Teaching ‘race’ at medical school: social scientists on the margin.” Social Studies of Science. 2008; 38, 793-808
  • "The colonial medicine of settler states: comparing histories of indigenous
    health." Health and History. 2007; 9: 144-54
  • “Science in the Philippines.” Philippine Studies. 2007;55: 285-316
  • “Immunization and hygiene in the colonial Philippines.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 2007; 62: 1-20.
  • “Natural histories of infectious disease: ecological vision in twentieth-century biomedical science.” Osiris. 2004; 19: 39-61.
  • “Postcolonial technoscience.” Social Studies of Science. 2002; 32: 643-58.
  • “Going through the motions: American hygiene and colonial ‘mimicry.’” American Literary History. 2002; 14: 686-719.
  • “The possession of kuru: medical science and biocolonial exchange.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2000; 42: 713-44.
  • “The perception of disease, and its meanings.” Lancet 2000. 1999; 354: SIV49.
  • "Leprosy and citizenship." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. 1998; 6: 707-30.
  • "The trespass speaks: white masculinity and colonial breakdown," American Historical Review. 1997; 102: 1343-70.
  • "Immunities of empire: race, disease and the new tropical medicine." Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 1996; 70: 94-118.
  • "Excremental colonialism: public health and the poetics of pollution," Critical Inquiry. 1995; 21: 640-69.
  • [With Myles Jackson and Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz] "Toward an unnatural history of immunology." Journal of the History of Biology. 1994; 27: 575-94.
  • "The reasoning of the strongest: the polemics of skill and science in medical diagnosis." Social Studies of Science. 1992; 22: 653-84.
  • "Climates of opinion: acclimatization in 19th century France and England." Victorian Studies. 1992; 35: 135-157.
  • "The New York needle trial: the politics of public health in the age of AIDS." American Journal of Public Health. 1991; 81: 1506-1517.

Book Chapters

  • "Biomedicine in Chinese East Asia: From semi-colonial to post-colonial?" In:
    Health and Hygiene in Modern Chinese East Asia. Ed. Angela Ki Che Leung and Charlotte Furth. Durham NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2010.
  • “Pacific crossings: imperial logics in U.S. public health programs.” In: Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State Ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.
  • "Réné Jules Dubos." In: New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 8 vols. Ed.
    Noretta Koertge. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; 2007.
  • [With Vincanne Adams] “Pramoedya’s chickens: postcolonial studies of technoscience.” In: The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd ed., 181-204. Ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy
    Wajcman. Cambridge MA: MIT Press; 2007
  • “Racial hygiene and the making of citizens in the Philippines and Australia.” In: Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Ed. Ann L. Stoler. Durham, NC: Duke, 2006.
  • “Postcolonial histories of medicine” In: Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, 285-307. Ed. John Harley Warner and Frank Huisman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press; 2004.
  • "The natures of culture: environment and race in the colonial tropics.” In: Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia, 29-46. Ed. Paul Greenough and Anna L. Tsing. Durham and London: Duke Univ. Press; 2003.
  • "The 'third-world' body." In: Medicine in the Twentieth Century, 235-46. Ed. Roger Cooter and John Pickstone. London and New York: Routledge; 2000.
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Other professional contributions

  • Dr. Anderson is an associate editor of the East Asian STS Journal and serves on the advisory editorial boards of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and Health and History, as well as on the council of the American Association for the History of Medicine.
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