Jules Alexander Skotnes Brown

Dr Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of science, medicine, and the environment. His research connects histories of animals, disease, knowledge production, and colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Broadly, he is interested in how science and imperialism have shaped relationships between humans and the environment in colonial contexts, from the control of 'disease reservoirs', to the creation of national parks, to the persecution of animals deemed ‘vermin’. Jules is currently a Research Fellow at University of St Andrews on the Wellcome Trust funded project, The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis. Here he is working on the global history of rats, zoonotic disease, and capitalist infrastructure in the twentieth century. His project explores how the activities of disease-carrying and food-devouring rats have both shaped infrastructures of twentieth-century economies, and how humans have attempted to exclude them from such infrastructures through rat-proofing. Through following the movement of rats across economic networks, his current project charts how and why rats have become despised ‘enemies’ of humankind, and what their mobilities reveal about the entangled histories of zoonosis, colonialism, capitalism, and species invasiveness.

Jules's PhD, completed at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (2017-2020) is a more-than-human history of pests, science, and segregation in 1910s-40s South Africa. His first book, Segregated Species: Boundaries, Pests and Knowledge in South Africa, 1910-48, explores the connections between pest control, racial segregation, and knowledge production in the Union of South Africa. Without equating or anagolizing racialized humans and pest animals, Segregated Species argues that racial segregation, pest control, and the sciences behind them were closely connected in early twentieth-century South Africa. Strategies for the containment of pests were redeployed for the management of humans and vice versa. Settlers blamed racialized populations for the abundance of pests and mobilized metaphors of pestilence to dehumanize them. Even ecological, epidemiological, and zoological knowledge produced about pests was segregated into the binary categories of "native" and "scientific." Black South Africans critiqued such injustices, and some circulated revolutionary rhetoric through images and metaphors of locusts. Ultimately, pest-control practices played an important role in shaping colonial hierarchies of race and species and in mediating relationships among human groups. Segregated Species demonstrates that the history of South Africa—and colonial history generally—cannot be fully understood without analyzing the treatment of both animals and humans.