Vivek Neelakantan

Vivek Neelakantan is a 2023 Brocher Fellow. His current research project investigates the evolution of primary healthcare in Southeast Asia whilst his earlier research investigated Indonesia’s relation with the WHO during the Cold War and the appropriation of social medicine by local physicians. His monograph Science, Public Health and Nation-Building in Soekarno-Era Indonesia (2017) was translated into Bahasa Indonesia. Vivek’s forthcoming edited volume with Routledge, entitled The Geopolitics of Health in South and Southeast Asia: Perspectives from the Cold War to COVID-19, examines the strengths and weaknesses of a regional approach to global health. In May 2023, Vivek co-organized a one-day interdisciplinary workshop entitled “Cholera in the Indian Ocean World since the Nineteenth Century,” with Eva-Maria Knoll, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Since 2015, his research has attracted external funding from the Wellcome Trust, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Truman and Eisenhower Presidential Libraries, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and the Brocher Foundation.