Office Address
1987 Upper Buford Circle
St. Paul, MN 55108
United States
Susan Jones
Distinguished McKnight University Professor
Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior
Prospective graduate students: I have no openings for graduate students at this time.
Research statement
Susan Jones is a historian of the modern biomedical and life sciences, with specialization in the historical ecology of disease, comparative and veterinary medicine, and environment and health. She is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (University of Illinois) and completed her Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to coming to Minnesota, she was a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Colorado (Boulder); she also spent three terms as a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University (UK) and two terms at the University of Utrecht. Her early articles and first book, Valuing Animals, focused on topics including the cultural history of animal and zoonotic diseases; the development of comparative medicine; animal protection groups and the laboratory sciences; and how science mediated the changing relationships between humans and animals (both wild and domesticated). Her current research analyzes the historical ecology of zoonotic diseases, and these projects have been awarded Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. She is working on a book-length project on the history of endemic bubonic plague in the borderlands of the Soviet Union (especially Kazakhstan in Central Asia). It explores how both indigenous and European scientific interpretations of disease have changed over time, how disease-causing agents have changed their ecology over time, and how the two have affected each other in social, political, and cultural context. She teaches courses in the history of ecology and environmentalism; global environmental history; history of biology and the life sciences; and the historical ecology of disease. She has also taught summer courses at Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) and the University of Vienna (Austria). She is an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Education and background
Education
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1997
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, University of Illinois, 1990
A.B., Biology, Harvard University/Radcliffe College, 1986