Britton Gustafson
Biography
Britton is a first-year History PhD student at UCLA, where he studies African history and the history of medicine. He focuses on East Africa and disease.
He aims to write disease histories how they haven’t been written and to conceptualize them within broad theoretical frameworks such as labor or empire. Currently, he is working on two research projects on the Third Plague Pandemic (1855-1959). Both aim to re-conceptualize the history of plague outbreaks in a metropolis, either Los Angeles or Zanzibar, as part of broader oceanic histories and to globalize our understanding of the factors influencing their experiences.
Publications
Gustafson, Britton. “African Resistance to European Conquest During the African Rinderpest Panzootic of 1887 to 1897. Michigan State Journal of History, 10. 2023.
Awards & Grants
2024 Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Fellowship, University of California, Los Angeles
2022 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (for Intermediate Swahili), U.S. Department of Education
Conference Presentations
Imperial Medicine and the Second World War: The Kenyan Plague Epidemic of 1941-42. Britton Gustafson. Honors Thesis Celebration, East Lansing, MI. April 28th, 2023.
Opposite Experiences During a Pandemic: The Samoan Islands During the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918 to 1920. Britton Gustafson. University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF), East Lansing, MI. April 8th, 2022.
