Research

Paul Greenough has three broad areas of interest. One area has been the history of public health. (He holds an additional appointment in the College of Public Health.) He first became involved with public health issues when he contracted hepatitis-B from a cholera inoculation given to him by a public health worker while attending a giant pilgrimage in India, which no doubt triggered his long standing interest in the history of immunization. He is something of a smallpox buff, and has published several historical papers on smallpox control in India between 1800 and 1975; he currently is collaborating with a UK historian, Dr. Sanjoy Bhattacharya, on the history of smallpox eradication in Bangladesh, 1960-75. Off and on for quite a few years he has been writing a book about investigative epidemiology in the US Centers for Disease Control, and for the completion of this projects he has followed CDC epidemiologists abroad to see how they fare outside their North American cultural moorings

A second area of his interest is the social history of India, for which he's managed to write at different times about rice-eating Bengali peasants and proletarians during famines, supercilious Indian rajas as tourists abroad, imperious conservation ecologists as designers of tiger reserves, rebellious Indian subject-citizens in the second World War, and recent innovations in Indian vaccinology. Because Indian social history is so well developed, and has so many practitioners, it offers a churning sea of continuous research directions, exciting theoretical twists and turns, and the possibility (even for historians) of making practical suggestions for intervention.

A third area of Greenough’s interest is in the cultural, material and political relationships between India and other parts of the world during the imperial period (1800-1960), and the follow-on consequences of migrations out of India in the age of globalization. Matters such as the diasporic ties between India, East Africa and the Caribbean fascinate him. This fascination has involved travel to destinations beyond South Asia and has given him a broader perspective on (and sometimes even a grudging respect for) the scale of European imperialism. It has also has allowed him to collaborate with Caribbean and African historians, anthropologists, writers and artists, with a resulting huge intellectual stimulation.

Closely related to Greenough's research interests are his involvements with interdisciplinary studies such as the Global Health Studies Program (http://intl-programs.uiowa.edu/academic/ghsp/index.shtml) which he currently directs, and the Crossing Borders Program (http://intl-programs.uiowa.edu/academic/crossingborders/). The latter began in 1999 as a small faculty research project, but after obtaining a major grant from the Ford Foundation and strong backing from International Programs and the College of Liberal Art and Sciences, it has become a sizable doctoral training program involving 12 departments that offers regular seminars, conferences and travel opportunities to students working at the interface of ethnic, national and geographic boundaries. Greenough relinquished the Crossing Borders directorship in summer 2006 but continues to be involved as the History department’s representative. His consistent experience was that good students dream up extraordinary and often multi-sited research projects that faculty then try to understand and race about trying to find support for. In a serious University, learning about and assisting with these highly varied dissertation projects are among the biggest rewards possible.