Dr Roberta Bivins

Office: H3.27

Phone: +44 (0)2476 524421

Email: r.bivins(AT)warwick.ac.uk

I will be on leave for the academic year 2011-2012.

Academic Profile:
  • Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Warwick (2008-).
  • Wellcome Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine, Cardiff University (2004-8).
  • Assistant Professor, History of Medicine, University of Houston (2001-3).
  • Research Associate, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester (2000-1).
  • Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester (1997-2000).
  • Wellcome Fellow, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London (1996-7).
  • PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997.
  • BA, Columbia College, Columbia University, 1991.
 
Undergraduate Modules Taught:

Medicine, identity and technology in modern history (HI269)

Medicine in America: from the Columbian Exchange to the Cancer Wars (HI31L)

 

Postgraduate Modules Taught/Supported:

Migration, Health and Ethnicity in Modern History Co-taught with Professor Hilary Marland

Themes and Methods in Medical History (convened by Dr Sarah Hodges; unit offered: Constructing Meaning)

Theory, Skills and Methods Programme (convened by Dr Anne Gerritsen and Professor David Arnold; unit offered: Race)


Research:

I am currently working on a study of the impact of post-war immigration – and particularly non-white immigration – on medical research and healthcare delivery patterns in the UK and the United States. I’ve organized my research into an analytic mesh, looking at this question from two different perspectives: those of patient and host communities and those of medical professionals. To fully explore these perspectives, I look at a variety of diseases, running across the causality spectrum -- so TB, a familiar infectious disease that many associated with Asian immigrants (but which many immigrants contracted only after their arrival in Britain and the US), works in contrast to the unfamiliar and non-infectious genetic hemoglobinopathies, sickle cell anaemia and thalassaemia. Then again, to catch the effect of (perceived and actual) cultural differences, I’m looking at two diseases closely linked to diet as well as ethnicity: rickets and adult onset diabetes. Opening up the political dimension, I’ve also included a brief study of the UK smallpox outbreak that coincided with the heated debates over the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1961-2, and a parallel study of US responses to the medical sequelae of the Bracero Program. For an overview describing some of my results, follow this link: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2011/Features/WTVM052334.htm

As well as constructing an account of what happened to these immigrants and to the doctors and biomedical researchers engaged in their study and care, I am looking for answers to broader questions. Obviously, I’m assessing the impact of two very different medical systems – one national and public, the other highly fragmented and private. But I’m also looking for continuities with imperial and ‘global’ medicine, and asking whether it makes a difference to how immigrant groups are perceived and treated if they are the former subjects of an acknowledged political empire, or of an unacknowledged economic one.

A second on-going project has grown from this research; with colleagues from Warwick Medical School, Cardiff University School of Medicine , the Department of Sociology and De Montfort University, I have recently been awarded pilot funding from Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study to study and improve research practices in the study of ethnicity and health. The project is entitled 'Making Ethnic Health Count: Building an Interdisciplinary Network to Develop Trans-Disciplinary Research Questions', and I am working with with Professor Ala K Szczepura, Clinical Sciences Research Institute, WMS; Dr Kamila Hawthorne, Clinical Senior Lecturer, Department of Primary Care & Public Health Cardiff University School of Medicine; Dr Hannah Bradby, Warwick Sociology; Dr. Mark Johnson, Professor of Diversity in Health & Social Care, Mary Seacole Research Centre, De Montfort University. Working as the IDEA Collaboration, we have organised a series of workshops bring researchers and research users from a range of disciplines and professional settings together. Research-users from policy, publishing, service-commissioning and research-funding backgrounds will introduce the problems they face in locating and using current research on ethnicity and health. Attending Foundation Members will respond, working to develop appropriate trans-disciplinary research quality standards and to build an interdisciplinary tool-kit of approaches to key problems in ethnicity and health. Selected presentations and discussions from each workshop will be circulated to our virtual Foundation Members for discussion and comment. Accompanied by this commentary, they will be made available as webinars for a wider audience of researchers, health professionals and policy makers, with the aim of shaping best practice across the field. You can follow our progress on our webpage: IDEA Collaboration

Other interests:

Among other topics, I am interested in:

  • the relationship between technology and medicine, particularly in the 20th century – this will be the subject of my next book, Domesticating Medicine: Medical Technology and the Modern Home;
  • popular responses to genetics since WWII, for example in relation to genealogy and personal identity; genetic conditions/predispositions; and genetically modified organisms;
  • the transfer of expert and particularly medical knowledge across and between cultures.

I will be happy to supervise dissertations in any of these areas.

 
Administration:
  • Convenor for the IDEA Collaboration.
  • Admissions Tutor (2008-2011).

Selected Publications:
  • "Histories of Heterodoxy" in Mark Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (OUP, August 2011) 576-597
  • Alternative medicine? A history (Oxford University Press, September 2007)
  • Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter, edited with John Pickstone (Palgrave, June 2007)
  • Acupuncture, Expertise, and Cross-Cultural Medicine (London: Palgrave, 2000)
  • ‘“The people have no more love left for the Commonwealth”: Media, Migration and Identity in the 1961-2 British Smallpox Outbreak’, Immigrants and Minorities 25 (November 2008) 3: 263-289
  • ‘Hybrid Vigour? Genes, Genomics, and History’, Genomics, Society and Policy 14 (2008) 1: 12-22
  • “‘The English Disease’ or ‘Asian Rickets’: Medical Responses to Post-Colonial Immigration”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine Autumn Issue 2007
  • "Imagining Acupuncture: Images and the Westernization of Asian Medical Expertise" in Vivienne Lo and Wang Shumin, eds, Imagining Chinese Medicine: A Visual History. Beijing: Renmin weisheng, 2007
  • “Acupuncture and innovation: ‘New Age’ medicine in the NHS,” in Jenny Stanton (ed.), Innovations in Health and Medicine (London: Routledge, 2002) 84-10
  • with Helen Valier, “Organization, ethnicity and the British National Health Service” in J. Stanton (ed.), Innovations in Health and Medicine (London: Routledge, 2002) 37-64
 
 

Roberta Bivins




Cover: Alternative Medicine?




Madness and Medicine




Acupuncture, Expertise