Julia Cummiskey, PhD

Assistant Professor

 

Institute for the History of Medicine
The Johns Hopkins University
1900 East Monument Street
Baltimore, MD 21205


Research interests

History of Global Health, Biomedicine in Africa; Epidemics; Infectious Disease Control; Public Health Campaigns; Health Communication

Bio

My research interrogates the history of “global health”—what it is, how it came to be, its limitations, and its potential. I pursue projects that I believe will shed light on the broader history of East Africa and its connections to other parts of the world as well as projects that offer opportunities to inform the practice of global health research and interventions. My first book Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global (Ohio University Press, 2024) considers the nature of global and local identities and perspectives at the Uganda Virus Research Institute. The book interrogates the history of knowledge production in global health and the relationships between people and institutions that have participated in it. These relationships are often framed as part of a binary between local and global that permeates much of the discourse in global health and calls for its decolonization. Understanding these categories, the assumptions that underlie them, and the history of their development is both pertinent and urgent because the shorthand of global versus local frequently masks ideas about race, power, and legitimacy that persist in contemporary global health.  I discovered that the categories of local and global are not nearly as fixed as they appear, and that researchers in East Africa have survived and often thrived in the space between those two poles for the better part of 100 years.

 

My current project explores the changing ideas about health communication in modern East Africa from top-down organized campaigns to commercial product promotion and informal channels for spreading information and misinformation. Tentatively titled Selling Health, this book will explore the different forms of communication that have been used to shape the Africans’ behaviors and consumption of products intended to (or purporting to) improve health in the 20th and 21st centuries. Combining history of medicine, African history, and business history, this project will examine the strategies used by pharmaceutical companies, makers of medical devices, providers of medical services, and public health marketing campaigns to promote the consumption of goods and services in the name of health. To understand how recent developments in social marketing and health communication fit into the longer history of efforts to improve the health of people in the Global South, I investigate how different parties have attempted to “sell” health and products, services, or behavior changes that increase health, to people in East Africa at different times in modern history. These campaigns shed light on changing ideas about health, gender, race, and class, among other things. Ultimately, the project will interrogate different imaginations of what constituted healthy life in Africa, who had the authority to define it, who was responsible for delivering it, and who had the opportunity to attain it in different places and moments in time.

 

My work combines archival practices, oral histories, and participant observation and I am especially interested in collaborative projects with anthropologists, public health practitioners, historians, and other researchers, especially those based in Africa.

 


 

Publications

Selected Articles

Egger JR, Konty KJ, Borrelli JM, Cummiskey J, Blank S, “Monitoring temporal changes in the specificity of an oral HIV test: a novel application for use in postmarketing surveillance.” PLoS One. 2010; 5(5): e12231. Wrote MMWR report and synthesized analysis of the test performance data used for the article.

Cummiskey J. “Drugs, Race and Tuberculosis Control in Baltimore, 1950-1978,” Social History of Medicine. 2014. 27(4): 728-750.

Cummiskey J. “‘An Ecological Experiment on the Grand Scale’: Creating an Experimental Field in Bwamba, Uganda, 1942-1950.” Isis. 2020; 111(1): 3-21. Selected for feature interview on ISIS social media and one month open access.

Cummiskey J. “Early AIDS Research in Rakai: Ugandan Experiences and Expertise in the Creation of the African AIDS Paradigm.” International Journal of African Historical Studies. 2020; 53(1): 1-26.

 

Chapters

Cummiskey J. Virus Research in 20th-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global. Ohio University Press. Forthcoming.

 

Other publications, presentations, and media

2008 “False-Positive Oral Fluid Rapid HIV Tests – New York City, 2005-2008.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 57: 660-665.

2020 “Why is there need for long-term investment in the Uganda Virus Research Institute, the Home of Zika?” Somatosophere March 23, http://somatosphere.net/2020/uganda-virus-research-institute-history-zika.html/.

2020 “It’s time to invest in public health infrastructure.” Fundamentals (e-newsletter from Johns Hopkins Medicine) April 21, https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/its-time-to-invest-in-public-health-infrastructure.

 

Teaching

HSMT 140.601 Methods in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

HSMT Health & Healing in Africa