Lecturer I, Afroamerican and African Studies and History of Art
About
Gaëtan Thomas is a historian of medicine and science in the twentieth century, with a focus on Franco-African frameworks. Thomas's first monograph, Vaccination, Histoire d’un consentement (Le Seuil, 2024) offers new insights into the role of numbers in the governance of immunization in France from the 1950s to the present. It follows a group of epidemiologists whose mission was to expand French pediatrics through interventions, training and medical research carried out mostly in Francophone Africa. 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 sanitary evacuations from Gabon, using the history of the Claude-Bernard hospital (now demolished) in Paris as a starting point. This hospital developed strong ties with Gabon after its first president, Leon Mba, was treated and died there in 1967. Subsequently, a pavilion was reserved at the hospital for patients who were flown in from Libreville. Understanding popular experiences of (health) infrastructures is central to this project, which relies on extensive archival work and interviews conducted in Gabon and France.
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).
