The Epidemiological Revolution

ongoing

The Epidemiological Revolution (TER) will trace the historical rise of epidemiological reasoning through the long twentieth century to understand how a novel data science transformed conceptions of health and disease in science and society. The project will map the conditions in which epidemiology became an authoritative science, and reconstruct how ‘the epidemic’ has assumed scientific and political urgency since 1900. This seismic epistemological shift resulted in new eminence for epidemiological modelling, a radical expansion of what counts as epidemiological data, and innovative applications for thinking about ‘epidemic’ phenomena far beyond traditional accounts of infectious disease. TER will address these aims through analysis of three discrete modes of epidemiological reasoning: 1. Modelling, and the invention of the epidemiological graph 2. Correlation, and the making of epidemiological data 3. Configuration, and the social formation of epidemiology Mapping these modes of reasoning, TER will create an ambitious digital collection of new empirical data and a comprehensive interactive record of the epidemiological revolution. TER will, for the first time, deliver a historical epistemology which examines the shifting contours of ‘epidemics’ as epistemic objects, as well as of epidemiology as a distinct system of thought in the long twentieth century. This project takes a ground-breaking approach to the historiography of data-science, combining high-impact case studies with digital research tools to explore the political, ethical and social challenges of this seismic shift.