Matheus Duarte is a historian of science and medicine. Since October 2025, he is the PI of the Wellcome Trust-funded project "How Did Infectious Diseases Become Wild? Plague, Yellow Fever, and Disease Ecology in the Brazilian Hinterland (1920-1975)".

Before joining King's College London, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of St Andrews (2020-2025) within the project ‘The Global War against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis’, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust.

Research

• History of Medicine
• History of Science
• Animal History

Between 1920 and 1975, Brazil was pitted against a new phenomenon: plague and yellow fever, two urban diseases, advanced towards the hinterland, where they infected rural populations and wild animals. Diseases moving from cities to wild spaces complexifies current mainstream interpretations about emerging infectious diseases.

Exploring this difference, Matheus' Wellcome Career Development project asks: which knowledge about these diseases emerged in Brazil? How did Brazilian health authorities control them? What were the social and environmental consequences of these measures? In answering these questions, the project will advance empirical knowledge on the history of disease ecology and will construct the idea of ‘wild disease knowledge’ to describe both the medicalisation of wild spaces and how the study of diseases in wild spaces transformed medical theory and practice.

PhD supervision

Matheus is happy to supervise students on the following topics:

• History of Medicine and Science
• Brazil and South America
• History of Diseases
• Animal History

Further details

See Matheus' research profile