Pandemics, Zoonoses and Epidemic Response

Dr Christos Lynteris has advised the House of Lords Covid-19 Committee (Life Beyond Covid), and his research on anti-epidemic masks has had a global impact, including relevant legislation in Mexico.

Christos has organised and contributed to photographic exhibitions around the world on epidemic diseases through his ERC project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic. A recent example being the online exhibition on the subject of “Controlling the Plague in British India: A Visual History of the Plague” at Science Gallery Bengaluru’s new platform “Contagion”.

His current project “The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis” (2019-2024), is funded by the Wellcome Trust with an Investigator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and examines the global history of a foundational but historically neglected process in the development of scientific approaches of zoonosis: the global war against the rat (1898-1948).

In addition, Christos is the Co-I of an on going MRC-funded project on Developing Effective Rodent Control Strategies to Reduce Disease Risk in Ecologically and Culturally Diverse Rural Landscapes in Tanzania and Madagascar.

Christos’ co-authored monograph Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation (MIT Press, 2020), was also listed by The Guardian among thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020.