Claire Edington

Claire Edington is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California San Diego, specializing in colonial/postcolonial medicine, global public health, and modern Southeast Asian history. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and has held positions at Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Her work bridges colonial mental health systems, addiction studies, and pandemic histories.

Education: PhD in History and Ethics of Public Health (Columbia, 2013), postdoctoral research at Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center (2013-2014). Her research explores how colonial institutions interacted with local practices, particularly in French Indochina and Vietnam.

Research Interests:

• Colonial psychiatry and biopolitical governance
• Drug addiction and state policies
• Global pandemic histories from Global South perspectives
• Medical pluralism and transnational knowledge exchanges

Major publications include Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam (Cornell, 2019), which challenges conventional views of colonial asylums by demonstrating active family engagement in psychiatric decision-making. Current projects include a co-authored global pandemic history and a monograph on drug addiction in 20th-century Vietnam.

Awards:

• 2020 Alfred Heggoy Prize Honorable Mention
• 2017 Weatherhead East Asia Institute Book Prize
• 2014 Pressman-Burroughs Career Development Award

Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (2025-2026). Ongoing research examines the social exclusion of addicts and state rehabilitation efforts from the colonial opium era through the HIV/AIDS crisis.