Dr John Manton
MA MLIS MSc DPhil
Assistant Professor
in History
I first joined LSHTM as part of the Anthropologies of African Biosciences Group in 2010, after research and lecturing posts in history at Oxford, Ulster, and KCL. Following two years in Social Anthropology at Cambridge, I returned to the Centre for History in Public Health in 2015, to work with Martin Gorsky on a Wellcome Trust funded project on Health Systems in History. From 2016 to 2020, I was Head of Humanities and Environmental Sciences at the Antimicrobial Resistance Centre at LSHTM.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
I lecture on public health histories in the global South on the History and Health module, am deputy module organiser for the MSc Public Health distance learning module History in Health, and co-organizer of the Decolonizing Global Health - History and Legacy lecture series. I also lecture on the Medical Anthropology and Public Health, Epidemiology and Control of Malaria modules, and occasionally on Globalization, and Evaluation of Public Health Interventions modules.
Research
My work is concerned with the interactions between health planning, scientific research, clinical practice, and welfare and development in West and West Central Africa and Southeast Asia from historical and anthropological perspectives. My research on the history and anthropology of disease control has focused on leprosy control in Nigeria, examining the political economy of disease and medicine. This research has been funded by Wellcome Trust doctoral and fellowship grants, and by the ESRC and the Leverhulme Trust. I am interested in the histories of post-colonial intervention in infection control and food/nutrition, looking at transnational programmes and resource-driven alliances at a local level, and also in local and institutional memories of scientific research and clinical practice in the post-colonial state in Africa and Europe.