Keynote Speakers
Professor Matt Smith, The University of Strathclyde
Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Matthew Smith is currently Professor of Health History at the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for the Social History of Heath and Healthcare. His interests in the history of health and medicine have centred on psychiatry and mental health, food and nutrition, allergy and immunology and child health. With the support of the Wellcome Trust and Arts and Humanities Research Council, his research has resulted in monographs, such as An Alternative History of Hyperactivity: Food Additives and the Feingold Diet (2011), Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD (2012) and Another Person’s Poison: A History of Food Allergy, as well as a number of co-edited volumes. His next monograph will be on the history of social psychiatry and, in future, he hopes to research the history of hydrotherapy in psychiatric practice. With Professor Cathy Coleborne, he co-edits the Palgrave series, ‘Mental Health in Historical Perspective’.
Professor Chelsea Watego, Queensland University of Technology
Chelsea Watego (formerly Bond) is a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman with over 20 years of experience working within Indigenous health as a health worker and researcher.
Chelsea’s work has drawn attention to the role of race in the production of health inequalities. Her current ARC Discovery Grant seeks to build an Indigenist Health Humanities as a new field of research; one that is committed to the survival of Indigenous peoples locally and globally, and foregrounds Indigenous intellectual sovereignty.
She is a prolific writer and public intellectual, having written for IndigenousX, NITV, The Guardian, and The Conversation. She is a founding board member of Inala Wangarra, an Indigenous community development association within her community, a Director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, and was one half of the Wild Black Women radio/podcast show, but most importantly, she is also a proud mum to five beautiful children.
Her forthcoming book Another Day in the Colony, published by UQ Press, is to be released in November 2021.
Professor Jeremy Greene, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Jeremy A. Greene, M.D., Ph.D., is William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine and Director of the Department of the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His research focuses on the interaction between medical technologies, medical knowledge, and the practice of clinical care. His most recent book, Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicines, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Greene's first book, Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease, was awarded the Rachel Carson Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science and the Edward Kremers Prize by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. In addition to publishing broadly about the history of disease in scholarly journals, Dr. Greene has published widely in clinical and public health journals including JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the American Journal of Public Health, and Health Affairs, and for popular audiences such as the Washington Post, Slate, Forbes, The Atlantic, and The Boston Review, as well as broader public engagement via interviews on NPR, television news, and documentaries. Dr. Greene received an MD and a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2005, finished a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women's Hospital in 2008, is board certified in Internal Medicine and a member of the American College of Physicians, and continues to practice primary care medicine in a community health center in East Baltimore. His current book project, The Anywhere Clinic: How Health Became Electronic is supported by grants from the National Library of Medicine, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.
Dr Julia Cummiskey, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Julia Cummiskey earned a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University in 2007 and worked for the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene in the Bureau of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and for the Montefiore Medical Center School Health program before getting a PhD in 2017 in the history of medicine from Johns Hopkins University. In 2019-2020 she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She is now an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga where she teaches African history and the history of public health and medicine. Dr. Cummiskey’s work has been published in the journals Isis, Social History of Medicine, and the International Journal of African Historical Studies. She is completing a book about the history of virus research in Uganda from the 1930s to the present and embarking on a new project on the history of health communication strategies in Africa.
