Nancy Tomes

Bio:

Read Dr. Nancy Tomes' CV

Nancy Tomes is SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook University. She holds a BA from the University of Kentucky (1974) and a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania (1978). Along with many articles and several edited collections, Tomes has authored four books: A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum Keeping (Cambridge, 1984; U Penn, 1994/2015); Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914, with Lynn Gamwell (Cornell, 1995); The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Harvard, 1998), winner of the American Association for the History of Medicine’s Welch medal and the History of Science Society’s Davis prize; and Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers (UNC Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Bancroft Prize.

In 2011, Tomes received the American Public Health Association’s Viseltear Award for her “distinguished body of scholarship in the history of public health.” Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the National Institute for Mental Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Her current research interests include the dynamics of misinformation and disinformation in public health messaging about novel infectious diseases. In 2022 she published (with Manon Parry) WHO Health Evidence Network Synthesis Report 77, “What are the historical roots of the COVID-19 infodemic? Lessons from the past.” She is working on a book titled Viral Fears: Historical Perspectives on Pandemic Futures that explores the concept of “virality” as a biological and an informational concept. As part of an initiative led by David A. Kessler, Tomes is also part of a team conducting oral histories about the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines from 2020 to 2024; a collaboratively authored book based on those oral histories is planned for publication in 2027.