Matheus Alves Duarte Da Silva

Dr. Matheus Alves Duarte Da Silva is a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews' Department of Social Anthropology, within the School of Philosophical and Anthropological Studies. His research focuses on the history of medicine and science, particularly pandemics, zoonotic diseases, and global health histories with a regional emphasis on Brazil and South America. He completed his PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (2020) and joined St Andrews as a postdoctoral researcher on the Wellcome Trust-funded project examining anti-rat campaigns and zoonosis. His work explores how anti-rat practices shaped concepts like disease reservoirs and sylvatic plague in 20th-century empires.

He has published extensively in journals such as Isis, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, and Medical Anthropology, and co-edited volumes including Rural Disease Knowledge (2024) and Beyond Science and Empire (2023). His current project adapts his thesis into a monograph on plague's global microbiological history (1890–1920).

Key research themes include the entanglement of colonial science practices, disease ecology, and the socio-scientific dimensions of epidemics. His articles analyze topics like plague history in Brazil, the global war against rodents, and the epistemic foundations of zoonosis. He also engages in critical reviews of anthropological and historical literature.