About the Speaker

Eram Alam (Harvard University, Department of the History of Science) specializes in the history of medicine, with a particular emphasis on globalization, race, migration, and health during the twentieth century.

Her first book, The Care of Foreigners, explores the enduring consequences of post-colonial physician migration from Asia to the United States. Since at least the 1960s, the US has trained fewer healthcare providers than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians. Initiated during the Cold War with the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the arrangement was conceived as a temporary stopgap. However, it has since become a permanent feature of US healthcare with immigrant physicians comprising at least a quarter of the physician labour force to date. The entanglement between immigration, foreign policy and US healthcare has perpetuated a segmented system whereby foreign physicians are directed to care for vulnerable patients in under resourced communities throughout the country. The Care of Foreigners foregrounds global dynamics embedded in the medical system to ask how and why Asian physicians – and especially practitioners from South Asia – have become integral to US medical practice and a ubiquitous presence in mainstream mass media.

Alam’s next project The Logistical Body was motivated by the pandemic and the subsequent breakdowns it made visible. Contemporary logistics is an attempt to master time and space to generate efficient, unimpeded movement. However, as we collectively witnessed, disruptions are inevitable; environments, nature, and uncooperative labour regularly threaten smooth operations forcing logistics to confront its limits. The Logistical Body investigates one limit – the material remainder of the labouring body within this hypermobile regime – and excavates the strategies, techniques, and logics used to manage this disordered entity. Logistics has reshaped subjectivities by altering the temporality of the political and technical, producing new ways of thinking and seeing, and compelling novel modes of care.