Kirsten Moore-Sheeley is a historian of medicine, science, and technology specializing in the history of global health in disease control. Her research focuses on the research, development, and implementation of global health interventions, particularly in East Africa. Her first book, Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects, examines how insecticide-treated bed nets became a cornerstone of global malaria control in the twenty-first century and what that process tells us about the development of global health science over the past forty years. The book centers experiences with research, policy making, and implementation in Kenya—a main site of insecticide-treated net research—to illuminate the influence of African settings, scientists, and populations on global health. The book will be coming out in December 2023 with Johns Hopkins University Press. For her next project, she is exploring the history of promissory vaccines still under development (e.g. malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and schistosomiasis vaccines), and the impact of research on these technologies for scientists, disease control efforts, and the populations intended to benefit from these biomedical promises.
Moore-Sheeley holds a PhD in the History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University and a Certificate in Global Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is currently a faculty member in the Program of the History of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Prior to that appointment, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the program, as well as a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at UCLA, where she taught undergraduate courses in the history of global health, science, and technology.
Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects (Johns Hopkins University Press, expected Dec. 2023)
“Marketing malaria control: nets, neoliberalism, and a new approach to fighting malaria,” Social History of Medicine 36, no. 1 (2023): 1-23.
“The products of experiment: changing conceptions of difference in the history of tuberculosis in East Africa, 1920s-1970s,” Social History of Medicine 31, no. 3 (2018): 533-554.