Research
Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health (2026-2031)
My new Wellcome-funded project will explore the connections, frictions, and collaborations between nature conservation and international, global, and planetary health in the twentieth century. Conservation is becoming a global health strategy. There is a growing scientific consensus that protecting species and landscapes acts as a prophylactic against the emergence of new pandemics or the acceleration of climate change through the loss of carbon sinks. But is this only a recent development? How did conservation gain prominence as a measure of protecting health? How were controversies over ecological crises addressed in the past and can they help navigate the future? And how has conservation shaped the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems on local and global scales? This project will provide the first major investigation of how species, landscape, and biodiversity conservation became global health strategies, and their consequences for humans, animals, plants, and microbes in the 1890s-2020s. To do so, it will uncover the connections between conservation and zoonotic disease emergence, climate change, and the health of Indigenous communities. Coining the term "Conserving Global Health" to describe the alliance that emerged between conservation and health, this project will show how conservation theories and practices were also public/global health measures. It will thus chart the prehistory of Planetary Health, make ground-breaking contributions to medical/environmental history, and be of relevance to
conservation sciences and practices.
This project will be tackled by three researchers focusing on:
- conservation and human health (myself)
- conservation and animal health (postdoc 1)
- conservation and earth systems health (postdoc 2)
I will be advertising these postdoctoral positions in due course. Please stay tuned!
Capitalist Plague: Rats, Zoonosis, and the Infrastructures of Commerce, 1890s-1950s (2020-2025)
My previous research project was part of a large Wellcome-trust funded project at University of St Andrews, 'The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis', led by Professor Christos Lynteris, where I was a research fellow in the history of rat proofing. This involved research into the connections between rats, zoonosis and infrastructure in South Africa, Namibia, Mauritius, the USA, the UK, and Australia. I examined how rats and the diseases they carried troubled international trade, and how humans rebuilt and remade trade infrastructures and sites of resource extraction to contend with their agency. Examining how humans rebuilt houses, cities, ships, plantations, and mining compounds in order to “build out rats” and plague, this research emphasised the importance of rats in shaping human worlds and vice versa. This work revealed that, on the one hand, the story of rat control dovetailed with the exercise of colonial power. For example, in Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) imperialists incinerated thousands of Indigenous and racialised people’s homes under suspicions that they provided “harbourage” to rats, which had the effect of segregating cities. On the other hand, the rat is also a figure that disrupted the infrastructures of imperial and capitalist power, leading to immense disruptions to shipping, commerce, and other capitalist activities. This research has been published in a series of articles on topics ranging from rats and urban segregation, to rats and maritime architecture, to rats and extractive industries, and special issues on the history and anthropology of disease reservoirs, and the history of invasive species and global health. Two further special issues on zoonosis and collections and zoonosis as a historical and anthropological concept are currently in development.
Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948 (2017-2024)
My PhD project, which became my first monograph, was a history of the connections among pest control, conservation, science and segregation in South Africa. Throughout the twentieth century, rural South Africa was dominated by systems of racial segregation and apartheid that brutally oppressed its Black population. At the same time, the countryside was defined by a related settler obsession: the control of animals that farmers, scientists, and state officials considered pests. Elephants rampaged on farmlands, trampling fences, crops, and occasionally humans. Grain-eating birds flocked on plantations, devouring harvests. Bubonic plague crept across the veld in the bodies of burrowing and crop-devouring rodents.
In Segregated Species, I argued that racial segregation and pest control were closely connected in early twentieth-century South Africa. Strategies for the containment of pests were redeployed for the management of humans and vice versa. Settlers blamed racialized populations for the abundance of pests and mobilized metaphors of pestilence to dehumanize them. Even knowledge produced about pests was segregated into the binary categories of "native" and "scientific." Black South Africans critiqued such injustices, and some circulated revolutionary rhetoric through images and metaphors of locusts.
Ultimately, pest-control practices played an important role in shaping colonial hierarchies of race and species and in mediating relationships among human groups. Skotnes-Brown demonstrates that the history of South Africa—and colonial history generally—cannot be fully understood without analyzing the treatment of both animals and humans.
Research grants
Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health (CGH)
WELLCOME TRUST (UK)
March 2026 - February 2031