HKU History > Staff > Recent Publications

Prof. R. Peckham
Prof. Robert Peckham

BA, PhD King's College London

 

Research Projects

 

2016- 'Epidemics and Migration: Histories of a World in Motion,' supported by the Faculty of Arts, HKU.

 

2016-2019 'Techno-Imperialism and the Origins of Global Health,' supported by a GRF award from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.

 

2014-2015 'Animal Histories in Human Health: Comparative Perspectives from East Asia, 1850-1950,' supported by the Faculty of Arts, HKU.

 

2013-2014 'Viral Imaginaries in Contemporary China,' supported by the Hsu Long-sing Research Fund, HKU.

 

2012-2015 'Infective Economies: Plague and the Crisis of Empire,' supported by a GRF award from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.

 

2012-2013 'Social Entrepreneurship for Health - Enhancing Networks and Building Capacities,' supported by ExCEL3 Project, Faculty of Social Sciences, HKU and the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

 

2011-2012 'Panic: Disease, Crisis, and Empire in East Asia,' supported by the Louis Cha Fund, HKU.

 

2010-2011 'Economies of Contagion: Plague, Trade, and Empire, 1894-1914,' supported by HKU Seed Funding for Basic Research.

 

 

Sole Authored Books 

     

    1. Life and Death in the Supercity: Hong Kong, China, and the Making of the Modern World (in preparation).

      2.  

    2. Panic: How Fear Made the World (London: Profile Books, under contract, forthcoming).

      3.  

    3. Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.374. ISBN: 9781107446762 (Paperback); ISBN: 9781107084681 (Hardback).

      4.  

    4. National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2001), pp.240. ISBN: 9781860646416.

     

     

    Edited Volumes

       

    1. The Cambridge History of Health in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, under contract).

      2.  

    2. Species of Motion: Infectious Diseases and Surveillance Technologies in Southeast Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, under contract, forthcoming)

      3.  

    3. Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), pp.242. ISBN: 9789888208449.

      4.  

    4. Disease and Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health (New York: Routledge, Studies in Cultural History, 2014), pp.198. ISBN: 9781138957428 (Paperback); ISBN: 9780415836197 (Hardback).

      5.  

    5. Co-edited with David M. Pomfret, Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), pp.320. ISBN: 9789888139521 (Paperback); ISBN: 9789888139125 (Hardback).

      6.  

    6. Rethinking Heritage: Cultures and Politics in Europe (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), pp.268. ISBN: 9781860647963.

     

     

    Journal Articles

     

    1. 'The Crisis of Crisis: Rethinking Epidemics from Hong Kong,' Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol.94 (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2020): 658-669. ISSN: 10863176.

      2.  

    2. 'Viral Surveillance: Cold War Politics and the 1968 Hong Kong Flu Pandemic,' Journal of Global History, vol.15, no.3 (Cambridge University Press: 2020): 444-458. ISSN: 17400228.

      3.  

    3. 'The Chronopolitics of COVID-19,' American Literature, vol.92, no.4 (Duke University Press: 2020): 767-779. ISSN: 00029831.

      4.  

    4. 'Anarchitectures of Health: Futures for the Biomedical Drone,' Global Public Health, vol.14, no.8 (Taylor & Francis: 2019): 12014-1219. ISSN: 17441692 [co-authored with Ria Sinha].

      5.  

    5. 'COVID-19 and the Anti-lessons of History,' Lancet, vol.395 (March 14, 2020): 850-851.

       

    6. 'Satellites and the New War on Infection: Tracking Ebola in West Africa,' Geoforum, vol.80 (Elsevier: 2017): 24-38 [co-authored with Ria Sinha]. ISSN: 0016-7185.

      7.  

    7. 'Polio, Terror and the Immunological Worldview,' Global Public Health (Taylor & Francis: 2016). ISSN: 1744-1706.

      8.  

    8. 'Hong Kong Junk: Plague and the Economy of Chinese Things,' Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol.90, no.1 (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2016): 32-60. ISSN: 0007-5140.

      9.  

    9. 'Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the Greening of Colonial Hong Kong,' Modern Asian Studies, vol.49, no.4 (Cambridge University Press: 2014): 1177-1209. ISSN: 0026-749X.

      * Prof. Peckham received an Outstanding Paper Award at the Hong Kong Studies Annual Conference (January 2017) for the paper ‘Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the Greening of Colonial Hong Kong.’

      10.  

    10. 'Contagion: Epidemiological Models and Financial Crises,' Journal of Public Health, vol.36, no.1 (Oxford University Press: 2014): 13-17. ISSN: 1741-3842.

      11.  

    11. 'Infective Economies: Empire, Panic, and the Business of Disease,' Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol.41, no.2 (Taylor and Francis: 2013): 211-237. ISSN: 0308-6534.

      12.  

    12. 'Economies of Contagion: Financial Crisis and Pandemic,' Economy and Society, vol.42, no.2 (Taylor and Francis: 2013): 226-248. ISSN: 0308-5147.

      13.  

    13. 'Social Entrepreneurship for Sexual Health (SESH): A New Approach for Enabling Delivery of Sexual Health Services Among Most-at-Risk Populations,' with Joseph D. Tucker, Kevin A. Fenton, and Rosanna W. Peeling, PLoS Medicine, 9/7 (July 2012). ISSN: 1549-1277 [selected as Editor's Choice].

      14.  

    14. 'Diseasing the City: Colonial Noir and the Ruins of Modernity,' Fast Capitalism, vol.8, no.1 (2011). ISSN: 1930-014X.

      15.  

    15. 'Medicine for Humanities? On Travelling Cultures and Interdisciplinarity,' Chinese Medical Humanities Review, 3 (University of Peking: 2010): 19-24. ISBN: 9787811169522 [in Chinese].

      16.  

    16. 'The City of Knowledge: Rethinking the History of Science and Urban Planning,' Planning Perspectives, vol.24, no.4 (Taylor and Francis: 2009): 521-535. ISSN: 0266-5433.

      17.  

    17. 'The Uncertain State of Islands: Nationalism and the Discourse of Islands in Britain and Greece,' Journal of Historical Geography, vol.29, no.4 (Elsevier: 2003): 499-515. ISSN: 0305-7488.

      18.  

    18. 'Map Mania: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece,' Political Geography, vol.19, no.1 (Elsevier: 2000): 77-95. ISSN: 0962-6298.

      19.  

    19. 'Diseased Bodies of the Nation: Suicide in Fin-de-Siècle Greece,' Journal of Mediterranean Studies, vol.9, no.2 (University of Malta: 1999): 155-173. ISSN: 1016-3476.

     

     

    Chapters in Edited Volumes

     

    1. '"Huge but Unknown": China in the Memory of the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic,' in Guy Beiner, ed., Pandemic Re-Awakenings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).

      2.  

    2. 'Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Fictions and the Biology of Emergence,' in Neel Ahuja, et al., eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp.309-324. ISBN: 9783030482435.

      3.  

    3. 'Viral Chatter and the Afterlife of Contagion,' in Christian Borch, ed., Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society (New York: Routledge, ‘Culture, Economy and the Social,’ 2019). ISBN: 9781138490642.

      4.  

    4. 'Bad Meat: Food and the Medicine of Modern Hygiene,' in Angela Ki Che Leung and Melissa L. Caldwell eds., Moral Foods: ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Foods in the Construction of Modern Asian Health Regimes (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2019), pp.173-200 ISBN: 9780824876708.

       

    5. 'Plague Views: Epidemics, Photography, and the Ruined City,' in Lukas Englemann, John Henderson, and Christos Lynteris, eds., Plague and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp.91-115. ISBN: 9781138326125

      6.  

    6. 'Critical Mass: Colonial Crowds and Contagious Panics in 1890s Hong Kong and Bombay,' in Harald Fischer-Tiné, ed., Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 369-392. ISBN: 9783319451367.

      7.  

    7. 'Symptoms of Empire: Cholera in Southeast Asia, 1820-1850,' in Mark Jackson, ed., The Routledge History of Disease (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp.183-201. ISBN: 9780415720014.

      8.  

    8. 'Spaces of Quarantine in Colonial Hong Kong,' in Alison Bashford, ed., Quarantine: Local and Global Histories (London and New York: Palgrave, 2016), pp.66-84. ISBN: 9781137524454.

      9.  

    9. 'Disease and Medicine,' in John MacKenzie, ed., Encyclopedia of Empire, 4 vols (Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2016), II, pp.698-709. ISBN: 9781118455074.

      10.  

    10. 'Panic Encabled: Epidemics and the Telegraphic World,' in Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), pp.131-154. ISBN: 9789888208449.

      11.  

    11. 'Introduction: Reading the Signs,' in Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), pp.1-21. ISBN: 9789888208449.

      12.  

    12. 'Game of Empires: Hunting in Treaty-Port China,' in James Beattie, Edward Mellilo and Emily O' Gorman, eds., Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp.202-232. ISBN: 9781441109835.

      13.  

    13. 'Nightmare on Wall Street: Zombie Bankers and the New Contagion,' in Sharon Packer and Jody Pennington, eds., A History of Evil in Popular Culture (Santa Barbara: Praeger/ABC Clio, 2014), pp.237-248. ISBN: 978-0-313-39770-7.

      14.  

    14. 'Introduction: Pathologizing Crime, Criminalizing Disease,' in Disease and Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp.1-18. ISBN: 9780415836197.

      15.  

    15. 'Pathological Properties: Scenes of Crime, Sites of Infection,' in Disease and Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp.56-78. ISBN: 9780415836197.

      16.  

    16. 'Ghosts in the Body: Infection, Genes, and the Re-enchantment of Biology,' in Olu Jenzen and Sally R. Munt, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), pp.95-106. ISBN: 9781409444671.

      17.  

    17. 'Medicine, Hygiene, and the Re-ordering of Empire,' co-authored with David M. Pomfret in Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), pp.1-14. ISBN: 9789888139125.

      18.  

    18. 'Matshed Laboratory: Colonies, Cultures, and Bacteriology,' in Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), pp.123-147. ISBN: 9789888139125.

      19.  

    19. 'The Politics of Heritage and Public Culture,' in R. S. Peckham, ed., Rethinking Heritage: Cultures and Politics in Europe (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), pp.1-13. ISBN: 1860647960.

      20.  

    20. 'Islands Apart,' in Stephanos Stephanides and Susan Bassett, eds., Translating Floating Islands (University of Bologna: COPTERA Reader Series, 2002), pp.85-89. ISBN: 9963875807.

      21.  

    21. 'The Exoticism of the Familiar and the Familiarity of the Exotic: Fin-de-siècle travellers to Greece,' in James S. Duncan and Derek Gregory, eds., Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp.164-184. ISBN: 0415160138.

      22.  

    22. 'Consuming Nations,' in Sian Griffiths and Jenny Wallace, eds., Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp.171-182. ISBN: 1901341062.

     

     

    Academic Reviews and Professional Publications

     

    1. 'Imperialism and Public Health in Iran,' Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol.94, no.1 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020): 143-144.

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    2. 'History of Medicine in Hong Kong,' Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong, vol.59 (2019): 239-24.

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    3. 'Public Health and Urban Culture in Shanghai,' Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol.74, no.4 (Oxford University Press, 2019): 480-482.

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    4. 'Public Health and the Modernization of China,' American Historical Review, vol.124, no.2 (Oxford University Press, 2019): 641-642.

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    5. 'Farewell to the God of Plague,' China Review International, vol.25, no.1 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018): 43-45.

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    6. 'Public Health and the Modernization of China,' American Historical Review (Oxford University Press: forthcoming). ISSN: 0002-8762 [review article].

      7.  

    7. 'Look at the Big picture in Fight against Dengue,' South China Morning Post (11 September 2018) [news article; with Ria Sinha].

      8.  

    8. 'Health Histories of Hong Kong,' Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong, vol.58 (2018), pp.273-274 [review article].

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    9. 'The New Tech of Epidemic Surveillance: A Magic Bullet?' Asia Global Online (3 May 2018) [online essay].

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    10. 'Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic,' Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol.91, no.2 (Johns Hopkins University: 2017): 464-465. ISSN: 0007-5140 [review article].

      11.  

    11. 'Where Has SARS Gone? The Strange Case of the Disappearing Coronavirus,' Somatosphere (June 8, 2016) [online essay].

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    12. 'The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850-1960,' American Historical Review, vol.120, no.5 (Oxford University Press: 2015), pp.1873-1874. ISSN: 0002-8762 [review article].

      13.  

    13. 'Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia,' The China Quarterly, vol.213 (Cambridge University Press: 2013), pp.220-221. ISSN: 0305-7410 [review article].

      14.  

    14. 'Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution,' Centaurus: An International Journal of the History of Science and its Cultural Aspects, vol.53, no.4 (Wiley-Blackwell: 2011), pp.333-334. ISSN: 0008-8994 [review article].

      15.  

    15. 'The History of Medicine: Challenges and Futures,' Perspectives on History, vol.48, no.8 (American Historical Association: November 2010), pp.45-47. ISSN: 1940-8048 ['State of the Field' essay].

      16.  

    16. 'A Dose of Humanities is Good Medicine After All,' South China Morning Post (12 October 2009) [news article].

     

     

    Covid-19 Publications

     

    1. 'Who Needs Arts in a Crisis?' Times Higher Education (December 21, 2020).

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    2. 'War of the Worlds: Covid-19 and Pandemic Belligerence,' Items [Social Science Research Council] (August 11, 2020) [online essay].

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    3. 'Past Pandemics Exposed China's Weaknesses,' Foreign Affairs [Council on Foreign Relations] (March 22, 2020).

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    4. 'The Contagious Power of Fear,' New Statesman (March 11, 2020).

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    5. 'Coronavirus: The Low Tech of the High Tech,' Somatosphere (March 6, 2020) [online essay].

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    6. 'Why the World Health Organization is Calling Coronavirus an "Infodemic,"' Prospect Magazine (March 4, 2020).

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    7. 'COVID-19 Infodemic: To Stem the Tide of Panic, We Need to Understand People's Fears, Not Condemn Them,' South China Morning Post (March 1, 2020).

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    8. 'Can We Overcome Pandemics?' Bloomberg: Digital Originals (February 24, 2020).

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    9. 'The COVID-19 Outbreak Has Shown We Need Strategies to Manage Panic During Epidemics,' British Medical Journal (February 21, 2020).

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    10. 'Coronavirus is Testing the Limits of China's – and Hong Kong's – Preparedness,' South China Morning Post (February 14, 2020).

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    11. 'A Health Emergency is No Time to Sideline the Medical Humanities,' Times Higher Education (February 10, 2020).

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    12. 'Coronavirus Panic,' The Independent (January 30, 2020).

     

     

    Journalism

     

    Over sixty articles, op-ed pieces, and reviews in newspapers and magazines, focusing on history, culture, politics, and health and aimed at a wide, non-specialist audience, including: The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman & Society, South China Morning Post, Times Higher Education Supplement, Times Literary Supplement, World Today.