Wellcome Trust studentship for York MA student

Posted on 19 May 2017

Lu Chen awarded prestigious Medical Humanities PhD studentship for smallpox project

We are delighted to announce that Lu Chen, an MA student in the Department of History at York, will start her PhD, provisionally titled ‘China in the Worldwide Eradication of Smallpox, 1949-1980: Recovering and Democratising Histories of International Health’, at the Centre for Global Health Histories in October 2017 under the supervision of Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya.

Lu’s work will be a pioneering study, the first to focus on China’s role in the eradication of smallpox and in doing so; it will challenge the US-and Western Europe-centric nature of historiography on international and global health.

Lu’s key questions will include: How were smallpox eradication measures conceived, planned and delivered in China? And what international, regional, national and local political negotiations made smallpox eradication policies successful? Lu’s work will study the engagements between the Chinese central government, World Health Organisation (WHO) HQ and WHO Western Pacific Region Office (WHO WPRO), national aid agencies from overseas, and select Chinese municipal and provincial governments to develop a detailed, complex assessment of the conceptualisation, planning and delivery of smallpox eradication in China.

We offer Lu our warmest congratulations and look forward to hearing the outcomes of this exciting project.