A New History of Infectious Diseases in the Southern Red Sea Region

• Applicant: Steven Serels, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 514554780

This ground-breaking project will be the first of its kind to use both archival records and recently generated scientific data to reconstruct the modern history of infectious diseases in the Southern Red Sea Region. This politically volatile part of the world, comprised of modern-day Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, is also one of the poorest. Though the disease burden in the region was shared across socio-economic classes at the start of the nineteenth century, contemporary studies show that the urban poor, internally displaced persons, and refugees are now more likely to both catch an infectious disease when it spreads and have a worse disease outcome. This study will be the first of its kind to chart the causes and consequences of this profound change. This project will also develop new techniques for integrating paradigm-shifting new insights generated by the fields of paleomicrobiology and phylogenetics into archive-based historical analysis. Breakthroughs in gene sequencing since the 1990s have allowed scientists to generate paradigm-shifting new insights into the historical evolution, spread, and functioning of DNA-based pathogens. These insights both compliment, and at times, contradict archival sources and, as a result, they must be read both with and against each other. Recognizing that diseases are biomedical realities mediated through social processes, this project will adopt two spatial scales of analysis. The first one is geographic and involves tracing the movement of infectious bacteria, viruses, and parasites into and across the region. The second is interpersonal and requires following pathogens as they move between human hosts. This second scale necessitates examining the social, economic, and political factors that change people’s relationships to their own and each other’s potentially disease carrying bodily secretions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants