Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva is a historian of science, medicine and the environment. From October 2025 to September 2030, he is the PI of the project "How Did Infectious Diseases Become Wild? Plague, Yellow Fever, and Disease Ecology in the Brazilian Hinterland (1920-1975)" (Wellcome Career Development Award).

His first monograph, Plague Across the Modern World: Sera, Vaccines and the Globalization of Microbiology from the South, 1890-1920, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2027. He has co-edited two books, Beyond Science and Empire (2023) and Rural Disease Knowledge (2024), both with Routledge, and the special issues ‘Disease Reservoirs: Anthropological and Historical Approaches’ (Medical Anthropology, 2023) and ‘Rethinking the History of Microbiology’ (History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2025).

From 2025 to 2029, he is the President of the Science and Empire Commission of the Division for the History of Science and Technology (DHST).

Research

• Critical Global Health
• History of Science and Medicine 
• Global and Imperial History 

Matheus Duarte’s research combines insights from the history of science, environmental history, oral history, and medical anthropology to provide critical analyses on the past and present of Global Health, One Health, and Planetary Health. Currently, he has two mainresearch projects: ‘How Did Infectious Diseases Become Wild? Plague, Yellow Fever, and Disease Ecology in the Brazilian Hinterland (1920-1975)’ and ‘Plague Genomics in their Social and Ecological Contexts in the Brazilian Hinterland (1920-Present)’, both funded by the Wellcome Trust and worth more than £1.5 million.

The projects explore the epistemological, social, and environmental consequences of infectious diseases moving from cities towards rural spaces in Brazil as a way to criticise and complexify current mainstream interpretations about infectious diseases emerging from wild animals. Together, the projects will advance empirical knowledge on the history of disease ecology from a Global South perspective and construct the idea of ‘wild disease knowledge’ to describe both the medicalisation of wild animals and ‘natural’ spaces and how this process transformed medical theory and practice.

PhD supervision

Matheus is happy to supervise students on the following topics:

• Critical Global Health
• History of Medicine and Science
• History of Brazil
• History of Diseases
• Environmental History and Animal History

Further details

See Matheus' research profile