About

Claire Edington is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California - San Diego, specializing in the colonial and postcolonial history of medicine, the global history of public health, and modern Southeast Asian history. She earned her PhD in the History and Ethics of Public Health from Columbia University in 2013. Her scholarly work includes her first book, 'Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam,' published with Cornell University Press in April 2019. This book draws on extensive archival research in Vietnam and France to explore the movement of patients through various institutions and challenges traditional notions of colonial asylums, highlighting the active participation of Vietnamese families and communities in psychiatric care and their influence on colonial authority. Edington's research has been recognized with awards such as the Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award, the Weatherhead East Asia Institute's First Book Prize, and an Honorable Mention for the Alfred Heggoy Prize. She is currently working on a cross-over academic trade book titled 'Epidemics: A Global History,' co-authored with Cindy Ermus, which examines the history of epidemics from the Black Death to COVID-19 from a Global South perspective. Her upcoming monograph, 'After Opium,' investigates drug addiction and recovery in 20th-century Vietnamese history, focusing on social exclusion, state projects, and the evolving concept of addiction within Vietnam's political and social contexts.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Psychiatry
• Economic growth
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Media studies
• Gender studies
• Library science
• Criminology
• Communication

Selected publications

• :<i>Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France</i>

  The Journal of Modern History · 2025-08-27

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Concluding Conversation: De-centring Science Diplomacy – CORRIGENDUM

  The British Journal for the History of Science · 2024-06-01

  erratumOpen access

  An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Re-Writing Pandemic Histories: Introduction

  Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences · 2024-05-21

  articleSenior author

  Journal Article Re-Writing Pandemic Histories: Introduction Get access Jacob Steere-Williams, Jacob Steere-Williams College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA steerewilliamsj@cofc.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Claire Edington Claire Edington University of California, San Diego, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, jrae005, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrae005 Published: 21 May 2024

  PublisherDOI

• Concluding conversation: decentring science diplomacy

  The British Journal for the History of Science · 2024 · 1 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  ): Research Associate, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK (special issue co-editor).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Biopolitical Vietnam

  Journal of Vietnamese Studies · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The administration and management of life, health, and populations—or “biopolitics”—have long been a tacit concern of scholars of historic and contemporary Vietnam. Yet to date, there has been relatively little formal treatment of the constructs of biopolitics or biopower by scholars working in the field of Vietnamese studies. Noting the rich evidence for a “biopolitical Vietnam” already extant in interdisciplinary literatures, this introduction to the special issue explores the potential analytic and disciplinary payoffs of yet more focused and intentional inquiries into the politics of life across Vietnamese contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• Drugs, Willpower, and the Colonial Biopolitics of Addiction in Vietnam

  Journal of Vietnamese Studies · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  This article examines the early twentieth-century transformation of the opium addict in colonial Vietnam into a distinct category of person, diseased and in need of special forms of intervention. Braiding together French and Vietnamese discourses around drug use and its social consequences, the article traces the development of a specifically colonial biopolitics of addiction. While the proliferation of both legal and illegal drugs came to signify different kinds of risk for French and Vietnamese audiences, this article argues that the coalescence of these discourses around the notions of willpower and self-determination nevertheless represented a powerful new assertion of state and social control over the body of the addict.

  PublisherDOI

• Des patients au travail

  Terrain · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Dans le Vietnam colonial, les asiles psychiatriques étaient conçus comme de grandes colonies agricoles, où les patients devaient travailler la terre sur le chemin de la guérison et d’une éventuelle libération. Cet article traite du rôle du travail comme une forme de thérapie pour les patients de l’asile, et de la façon dont les experts psychiatriques français étaient constamment entraînés dans des réseaux plus larges de soins et d’économie, déplaçant ainsi l’attention de l’asile lui-même vers le monde au-delà de ses murs.

  PublisherDOI

• Book Review

  Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A · 2022-01-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Psychiatric patients at work

  Terrain · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In colonial Vietnam, mental asylums were designed as large agricultural colonies, where patients would work the land on the path to healing and eventual liberation. This article discusses the role of labor as a kind of therapy for asylum patients, and how French psychiatric experts were constantly drawn into broader networks of care and economy, thereby shifting attention from the asylum itself to the world beyond its walls.

  PublisherDOI

• The Most Social of Maladies: Re-Thinking the History of Psychiatry From the Edges of Empire

  Culture Medicine and Psychiatry · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  This paper argues that the colonial experience was never just "out there" but was a constitutive feature of the global development of psychiatry and, indeed, of social medicine itself. I show how regional knowledge about psychiatry, produced in scientific exchanges across colonial Southeast Asia over four decades and culminating with the 1937 Bandung Conference, became part of new international approaches to health care in rural areas, and later, in developing nations. In particular, I discuss how the embrace of the agricultural colony as a solution to the problem of asylum overcrowding occurred at the same moment that colonial public health experts and officials were moving away from expensive, technocratic fixes to address indigenous health needs. Yet in the search for alternatives to institutionalized care, including forms of family and community support, colonial psychiatrists were increasingly drawn into unpredictable and unwieldy networks of care and economy. Drawing on research from Vietnam, this paper decenters the asylum so as to recast the history of colonial and postcolonial psychiatry as integral to the history of social medicine and global health. The paper then returns to Bandung in 1955, the site of another famous meeting in the history of Third World solidarity, to consider how the embrace of the "Bandung spirit" may provide new avenues for decolonizing the history of colonial and postcolonial psychiatry.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ronald Bayer

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Gordon Barrett

  University of Manchester

  1 shared

• Aya Homei

  1 shared

• Ritsuko Kakuma

  London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

  1 shared

• Jacob Steere‐Williams

  College of Charleston

  1 shared

• Harry Minas

  1 shared

• Hans Pols

  1 shared

• Kate Sullivan

  University of Oxford

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2014 Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Develop…
• Weatherhead East Asia Institute's First Book Prize (2017)
• Honorable Mention for the Alfred Heggoy Prize by the French…