About
Matheus Duarte holds a PhD in the History of Science from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS- Paris). His main research interests lie in the intersection of History of Science, History of Medicine, and Global History.
Research
Matheus is a post-doctoral research fellow (2020–2025) at the University of St Andrews, with the Wellcome-funded project The Global War against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis (grant number 217,988/Z/19/Z). In the project, he investigates the social and scientific history of rat-catching practices developed in Brazil, the USA, and in the French and British Empires during the first half of the twentieth century, and how these practices transformed the rat into a global actor on plague studies and intervention. Moreover, he examines the global circulation and construction of the idea of sylvatic plague and the parallel framing of specific environments, such as deserts, forests, and rural areas, and of a plethora of wild rodents as reservoirs of plague.
