Professor Mary Brazelton

My research interests lie broadly in historical intersections of science, technology, and medicine in China and around the world. Recent projects include a study of the Sino-French Institute in Lyon, a collaborative exploration of the history of transportation technologies with particular consideration for transnational histories of civil aviation, and the early history of penicillin development in China. I received my PhD in History from Yale and taught Chinese history at Tufts University before coming to Cambridge. In 2020, I received a CUSU Student-Led Teaching Prize in Partnership; in 2023, I received a Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching.

In 2023, I published China in Global Health: Past and Present, which argues that Chinese peoples and places were central to the development of international and global health in the twentieth century. My 2019 book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China, examines the history of mass immunization in twentieth-century China. It suggests that the origins of the vaccination policies that eradicated smallpox and controlled other infectious diseases in the 1950s, providing an important basis for the emergence of Chinese health policy as a model for global health, can be traced to research and development in southwest China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

At Cambridge, I am also a Fellow of Jesus College where I direct studies in HPS, an associate member of the World History Subject Group in the History Faculty, and a Trustee and Research Fellow of the Needham Research Institute.