Jules 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. He has written on the history of conservation, pest control, zoonotic disease, and environmental degradation, primarily in southern Africa. Jules is currently a postdoctoral fellow at University of Liverpool and an Honorary Research Fellow at University of St Andrews. From March 2026-2031, he will be directing the Wellcome Trust funded research project 'Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health'. The project will explore the historical engagements, collaborations and frictions between conservation theories and practices and international, global, and planetary health in the long twentieth century. In so doing, it will provide a prehistory of Planetary Health.

Jules's 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 analogising 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.