Jim Harris is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Ohio State, from which he received his Ph.D. in 2017. He is an historian of modern Europe (with a focus on Great Britain) and the history of science, medicine and the environment. His research focuses on the history of public health and the history of infectious diseases from both a medical and environmental historical perspective.
Harris has published articles on the history of the 1918 flu pandemic in Great Britain and an intellectual history of British anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, and his chapter “Raising a Healthy Nation: Provisioning Public Health in British Schools c. 1890-1914” will be forthcoming in late 2023 in Curriculum of the Body and the School as Clinic: Histories of Public Health and Schooling, 1900-2020, edited by Kellie Burns and Helen Proctor and published by Routledge.
Harris is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of public health campaigns in urban England at the turn of the twentieth century, tentatively titled For the Sake of the Children: Public Health and Urban Ecology in England, 1885-1919. He is also beginning a new article-length study of the environmental history of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which would later become BP), which was the supplier of oil to the British navy when it was first converting its ships from coal to oil on the eve of the First World War.
At Ohio State, Harris teaches a range of environmental and health-related courses, including The Climate Crisis: Mechanisms, Impacts, Mitigations; Global Environmental History; Water: A Human History; Health and Disease in Human History; The History of Medicine on Film; History of American Medicine; and Vaccines: A Global History.