Assistant Professor of History and History of Art
About
Gaëtan Thomas is a historian of medicine and science in the twentieth century.
Thomas' first monograph, Vaccination, Histoire d’un consentement (Le Seuil, 2024) examines how immunization - an intervention often described as controversial - became normalized in France from the 1950s to the present. This book developed out of his doctoral project, which was supported by a Fulbright fellowship and awarded the Alain Desrosières Prize for the history of statistics.
Thomas is currently researching the history of medicine in post-independence Gabon, a so-called "African Emirate" where the legacy of French colonial medicine looms large. He studies the way public health has been managed and experienced during the 1970s and 80s, the decades of the oil boom.
Thomas has published articles in The Bulletin of the History of Medicine and The Journal of Contemporary History. With Guillaume Lachenal, he co-authored the Atlas historique des épidémies (Autrement/Flammarion, 2023), a work of public scholarship on the relationships between space and infectious diseases.
As a historian, he aims to develop and maintain a sensibility that borrows tools and insights from other academic fields. Alongside the publications mentioned above, Thomas has edited and translated into French two prominent American art critics associated with the cultural history of AIDS and queer studies: Douglas Crimp (Le point du jour, 2016) and Craig Owens (Même pas l'hiver, 2022).
