School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

Ongoing Research

The Epidemy

The Epidemiological Revolution. A History of Epidemiological Reasoning in the Twentieth Century.

(ERC Starting Grant, January 2021 - December 2025)

Project Website: The Epidemy / Twitter: EpidemyERC

Epidemiology has historically been a niche field in the medical sciences, often side-lined by laboratory scientists and clinicians as a weak and inferior science. However, over the twentieth century, the field and its experts have gained unprecedented authority and influence. Epidemiologists have won the trust of policy makers and the general public to define public health crises, such as infectious diseases, chronic conditions and 'unhealthy' lifestyles. I seek to understand how epidemiologists have built their arguments, how they define epidemics and what makes this kind of reasoning unique. The project’s focus will be on the history of three elements of ‘epidemiological reasoning.’ First, epidemiologists have built models to simulate epidemics, which now have powerful influences on decision making in public and global health, as recently demonstrated in Covid-19. Second, epidemiologists brought together scattered information from different sources to combine and compare data. Third, the field required interdisciplinary expertise from different fields to establish its strong generalist tradition.

Digital Epidemiology

With the Chancellor's Fellowship I work on the Long History of Digital Epidemiology. The project illuminates historical developments in biomedicine and epidemiology that led to the emergence of an epidemiological reasoning based on data and models, rather than doctors’ diagnoses and the mere counting of cases. With my Chancellor's Fellowship I show what influence practices of abstraction and formalization in the history of epidemiology had on today’s digital health landscape and ask how epidemiological reasoning assumed the overwhelming authority, with which it renders economic and political concerns obsolete in times of pandemic crisis (cf. COVID-19). 

Completed Projects

I have developed a pilot study with Bea Alex, funded by the Challenge Investment Funds (UoE), to evaluate pathways for Text-Mining Outbreak Reports of the Third Plague Pandemic. 

Other Research Activities

I am collaborating on a project funded by the Australian Research Council and led by Niamh Stephenson (University of NSW), "Realising big data’s potential to address social and health inequities."

Topics interested in supervising

History and Sociology of Biomedicine

History of Epidemics and Epidemiology

Social and cultural dimensions of Plague, AIDS, Zika, AMR and Covid-19

History of Sexuality

Medicine and Theory

If you are interested in being supervised by Lukas Engelmann, please see the links below for more information:

• PhD in Science and Technology Studies
• MSc (R) Science and Technology Studies