Prof Bertrand Taithe - research

Specific research interests:

Having begun as a British historian of urban sociology and Henry Mayhew in particular, I moved on to study the history of medicine and sexuality during and immediately after my doctoral thesis. From 1993 onwards my work has become concerned with the themes of medicine and war. My view was that the social and cultural history of medicine and war proved to be a field in need of revision. My work has always used cultural history informed by anthropology, history of science, medicine and technology, philosophy and sociology. The questions that I wished to address were directly relevant to these disciplines and to an interdisciplinary approach to cultural history based on the 'linguistic turn' and the use of theory as appropriate. My first monograph, devoted to the history of Paris during the sieges, was consistent with my earlier work on urban representations and invited a reflection on the history of modernity and the city.

Through my interdisciplinary work as a teacher on courses on cultural history, as well as on Michel Foucault (with Ken Hirchkop, Terry Eagleton, and Graham Ward), I became aware of the potential that interdisciplinary work represented. We embarked on a collective venture on the Arcades Project work of Walter Benjamin. Our project, published as Benjamin's Arcades an Unguided Tour represented the congruence of our research interests in a given moment in the history of ideas.

Current research projects:

While my work on the Franco-Prussian war and Commune is now over, one of its salient features, namely the history of humanitarianism (a subject that I explored in preliminary fashion in articles and some chapters of my book) has now led me to develop my new project on the history of humanitarianism in the French colonial sphere. I began this work some nine years ago, and it is beginning to bear fruit in the form of articles exploring the early phases of French humanitarianism and the later phase (in the late twentieth century) of humanitarian medicine and the violence associated to conquest. This is explicitly a return to the field of the cultural history of medicine and war. This research directly relates to the Research Centre in the Cultural History of War and to the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute's work (see www.hcri.ac.uk) . It is a broad theme covering the nexus of humanitarianism and war over a long period of at least 130 years, predominantly in Africa.

My current research dwells on the history of humanitarianism in relation to military medicine, in particular colonial medicine and missionary medicine, in particular Catholic missionary work in the French empire broadly defined.

My particular areas of interest are: Algeria from 1860 until 1939; the conquest of Niger and in particular the Voulet-Chanoine expedition of 1898-9 (see my most recent book the KIller Trail, OUP, 2009), the Cameroon and in particular the work of Ad Lucem and Dr Aujoulat, the new forms of humanitarian medicine arising in the post-colonial context and for the later period MÃdecins Sans FrontiÃres.