Inaugural Lecture of Dr. Eric D. Carter as Edens Professor of Geography and Global Health

The Inaugural Lecture of
Dr. Eric D. Carter 
as Edens Professor of Geography and Global Health

In Pursuit of Health Equity: A History of Latin American Social Medicine

Reception following the lecture.

Eric D. Carter is the Edens Professor of Geography and Global Health at Macalester College, where he has taught since 2012. Originally from California's San Fernando Valley, he received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's and PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Before joining the Macalester faculty, Carter taught at Millersville University and Grinnell College. He was also a visiting faculty member at the National University of Tucumán in Argentina in 2015.

Carter’s interdisciplinary research lies at the nexus between medical geography, political ecology, and the history of public health, with a regional focus on Latin America. Main areas of research interest include the political ecology of infectious and vector-borne diseases; environmental and social history of disease control; social medicine and public health in Latin America; and the biopolitics of public health interventions. 

His first book, Enemy in the Blood: Malaria, Environment, and Development in Argentina, received the Elinor Melville Prize for best book in Latin American environmental history from the Conference on Latin American History. His second book, In Pursuit of Health Equity: A History of Latin American Social Medicine, is the result of seven years of research, mainly in Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica, supported by fellowships from the US Fulbright Scholar Program and the American Council of Learned Societies. 

His other published work has covered an array of topics, including the influence of neoliberalism on health promotion projects in the United States, environmental justice politics in Latino communities of Los Angeles, the political ecology of dengue fever in Ecuador, and the effect of neighborhood social capital on resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic in Tucumán, Argentina. This research, often in collaboration with students and colleagues from the United States and internationally, has been published in such venues as the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Journal of Historical Geography, Geoforum, Health and Place, Social Science and Medicine, and Global Public Health. Carter has served as book review editor for the Journal of Latin American Geography and currently serves as the associate editor for geography for the Latin American Research Review. 

In addition to the Geography Department, Carter is part of Macalester’s Latin American Studies program and the Community and Global Health concentration, which he directed for five years.