Research Interests

History of sexually transmitted diseases; history of pharmaceuticals and their regulation; history of social medicine and community health care; history of medical waste; history of body fluids.

Bio

I am a visiting Fulbright research fellow at the Department of History of Medicine at Hopkins the academic year 22/23, coming from the Department of global health and community medicine at the University of Oslo. I trained as a physician but moved into medical history after completing medical school as a graduate student in the history of ideas. I have most of my teaching in medical school, where I until recently have directed the program on community medicine, and I teach a wide range of courses (social determinants of health, social justice and health equity, medical anthropology and medical sociology as well as medical history). I have still a toe in medical practice: Each summer, I work as a family doctor in the Lofoten islands, north of the polar circle. The rest of the year I work as a volunteer at the Healthcentre for Undocumented Migrants in Oslo. I cherish these moments of working as a clinician – and draw on the experiences from there both in teaching and research.

In my research I started off as a 18^th century historian, focusing on the history of sexually transmitted diseases (to use an anachronistic term) in Norway and Scandinavia. I have also worked on the history of reproduction, and on the history of body fluids. In later years I have moved closer to the present and engaged in more globally oriented projects, chiefly on projects relating to histories of pharmaceuticals, of antibiotic resistance and of healthcare practices. Cross-cutting topics in my research have been temporalities in health and disease, and histories of processes of biomedicalization and its discontents. I am an interdisciplinary animal, and like working with anthropologists, historians and healthcare professionals. Increasingly, my historical research has been grounded in and inspired by my clinical practice, and the questions I ask are increasingly challenge-driven. Currently, I am very interested in a field that is totally new to me – histories of medical waste. I look very much forward to being able to spend time with you all at Hopkins this year!