Faculty Profile: Merlin Chowkwanyun

How does your research on the history of social movements fit into public health research, and more specifically into sociomedical sciences? What are you working on now in that area?

In SMS and public health more generally, we’ve been able to identify with ever increasing precision a number of inequities, problems, and barriers to optimal health. But the flip side of the question that’s always interested me is what people have done about it, both in the past and in the present.  What strategies have been effective and in what circumstances

Right now, I’m working on a project about a group of activist medical students and community health workers in the 1960s and 1970s, who pushed academic medical centers – including Columbia – to be more responsive to the neighborhoods around them, incorporate more about the social dimensions of health into their programming, and that sort of thing. That’s the first part of the book. The second examines their attempts to organize politically in the South Bronx and Lincoln Hospital, not too far from here. The latter endeavor was a mixed bag with a lot of burnout and turmoil. But we can learn as much about misses as hits, I think.

I also teach a class on Health Advocacy in the Fall. We talk about a bunch of health advocacy efforts around climate change, environmental justice, mass incarceration, HIV/AIDS, food politics, disabilities, and other topics – a new one every week.

Tell me about some of your other major projects that you’re currently working on or ideas you have for future research?

In addition to the work on health activism, I’m also writing a book based on my dissertation. It’s about medical care and environmental health controversies in four regions after World War II: New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Central Appalachia (mainly Eastern Kentucky). We all are taught about the limits of viewing public health through a strictly medical care lens while ignoring a number of departments, and I wanted to view that debate at a ground-level in a longer historical arc. I’ve always been interested in the impact of local context on public health problems, so taking this perspective allowed me to explore a lot of regional variation. Within the same covers, you learn about the first community health centers in cities, the impact of the 1960s urban riots on health care, the health impacts of the petrochemical industry on the west coast and surface mining in Appalachia, lead poisioning in Cleveland, among others.

With David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, I’m also working on constructing a new dataset and website called Toxic Docs that will allow users to search and filter through a bunch of previous classified documents on industrial poisons. Dr. Fairchild, Sharon Greene, and I are also repurposing some of this technology to analyze gun control framing.

I’m really happy to be in a department with this cross-disciplinary faculty. I’m always trying to see what new methods of non-historians might prove useful to historians and vice versa.

What is your favorite thing about teaching or mentoring?

Probably getting to wrestle with a difficult question collectively rather than in isolation. When I taught the Health Advocacy class this fall, I thought things outside of campus couldn’t have been as tumultuous as they were in 2014. I was wrong: we saw at least two high-profile instances of police brutality, two mass shootings; unrest on campuses over racial and gender climate; resurgent nativism; and many other developments. It was easy to get disheartened over this state of affairs, but I really appreciated working through it with a bunch of bright students who helped anchor it to the academic work we were reading. I also like knowing that I’m teaching students who will be on the front lines trying to remedy these ills.

The other thing I like is working through a piece of writing with a student and starting from something really “drafty” or muddled, finding the points, and then reworking and tweaking until it sounds right. I remember people really helping me with that when I was in graduate school, so I try to pass it on.

Do you have any hobbies? Or favorite books?

One of my hobbies is following the NBA basketball season, especially my favorite team (my hometown Los Angeles Lakers) and my favorite player (Pau Gasol), who now plays for the Bulls.  The Lakers have been an absolute disaster the past few years, but I suppose this is what we get for all our years of glory and success.  I am also a huge boxing fan and like reading about the social dimensions and histories of both these sports and the ethical controversies around them. I’d like to one day write more about this someday. I enjoy visiting legendary playgrounds where NYC legends like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Metta World Peace played.

I also like watching and playing with animals, especially dogs. (I spend way too much time on Youtube watching dogs do silly and dumb things.) My dog lives with my mother in Los Angeles, but I’m thinking of getting one here. I mainly play with my colleague Dr. Amy Fairchild’s dog. I live in Inwood, and it’s also really cool to see all the wildlife around Inwood Hill Park and the marsh.

My favorite book is a three-part biography of Leon Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. The first volume came out more than 50 years ago, but it holds up. It’s epic and tragic, and one of those books that made me really realize how powerful historical writing could be. 

What do you hope to accomplish this semester?

I am excited that ToxicDocs.org is going to launch soon, and we are putting some final touches on the aesthetic. Now that I’m settled, I really want to concentrate on writing my book and finishing up some interviewing of the health activists I talk about earlier. I’m also developing a Mixed Methods course that I’m teaching for the first time next Spring and figuring out ways to make it useful and well-integrated with the rest of the curriculum.