Claire Edington

Claire Edington is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California - San Diego where she specializes in the colonial and postcolonial history of medicine, the global history of public health and modern Southeast Asian history. She received her PhD in the History and Ethics of Public Health (Departments of Sociomedical Sciences and History) from Columbia University in 2013. Before arriving at UCSD, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University (2013-2014) and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts - Boston (2014-2015).

Her first book, Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam, was published with Cornell University Press in April 2019. Drawing on hundreds of patient case files discovered in the archives in both Vietnam and France, Beyond the Asylum follows the movements of patients in and out of asylums and between prisons, poor houses, youth reformatories, hospitals and family homes. Together, these individual patient itineraries challenge our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting where patients rarely left, run by experts who enjoyed broad and unquestioned authority. Instead, they reveal how ideas about what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, were debated between psychiatrists, colonial authorities and the public throughout the early decades of twentieth century. Vietnamese families sought the care of local and foreign experts but they also discovered recipes for home remedies in the pages of popular scientific journals that appeared in interwar Vietnam as part of an emerging local print culture. Beyond the Asylum argues that Vietnamese families and communities actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state even as they forced French experts to engage with local understandings and practices around insanity.

Beyond the Asylum has achieved recognition for its scholarly contributions including the 2014 Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine for outstanding work in the twentieth-century history of medicine or medical biomedical sciences. In May 2017, it was awarded the Weatherhead East Asia Institute’s First Book Prize and in July 2020, the book received Honorable Mention for the Alfred Heggoy Prize, awarded annually by the French Colonial Historical Society for the best book published on the history of the French empire from 1815 to the present. 

She is currently finishing a cross-over academic trade book entitled Epidemics: A Global History for the University of California Press. Co-authored with Cindy Ermus (University of Nebraska), this book rewrites the global history of epidemics from the perspective of the Global South, spanning the period of the Black Death through the Covid pandemic.  

Her next major research monograph, After Opium: drug addiction and recovery in 20^th century Vietnamese history, considers the social exclusion of addicts and state projects for their recovery from the time of the colonial opium monopoly through the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The project has two major motivating questions: When did the figure of the ‘addict’ first appear in Vietnam and how has it been deployed at different moments in Vietnam’s political past? And how were these shifts experienced by those labeled as ‘addicts’ and their families? It argues that the historical instability of addiction as a concept – its layered and varied meanings, and especially its framing as a pathology that requires rehabilitation – emerged from both local debates about the dangers of drug use and transnational exchanges of expertise and policy which tied the fate of Vietnamese drug addicts to those elsewhere. This project has recently received funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2025-2026).

For publications and CV, please visit: https://ucsd.academia.edu/ClaireEdington