About

Alexandre White is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, joined the faculty in 2019 after completing a Provost’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the same institution. He holds a B.A. in Black Studies from Amherst College, an MSc. in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD in Sociology from Boston University. He is also jointly affiliated with the Department of the History of Medicine in the School of Medicine and serves as an Associate Director for the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. His research interests include Comparative Historical Sociology, Medical Sociology, Post-Colonial Theory, Global and Transnational Sociology, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Sociology of Global Health. White's work examines the social effects of infectious epidemic outbreaks in both historical and contemporary contexts, focusing on the global mechanisms that produce responses to outbreaks. His book project, Epidemic Colonialism: A Social History of International Disease Response, explores the historical roots of international responses to epidemic threats, analyzing how certain outbreaks become 'global threats' and how responses are shaped by international regulations and organized efforts. His research draws upon archival data from various global institutions and qualitative interviews with senior global health actors. White's scholarly contributions include analyses of the formation and transformation of international disease control conventions from the 19th century to the present, and how these influence responses to epidemics. His work also explores issues of racial subjectivities, anti-colonial revolutions, and colonial resistance. His publications and research have been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association, and his work has been cited in media outlets such as CNN and NPR.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Medicine
• Sociology
• Virology
• Public relations
• Art history
• Business
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• Nursing
• History
• Criminology
• Law

Selected publications

• Review Symposium of Claire Decoteau’s Emergency

  Journal of World-Systems Research · 2026-04-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This symposium is based upon comments from a 2025 author meets critics discussion at the Eastern Sociological Society Conference. Between August 2020 and May 2021 Dr. Decoteau worked with four graduate students: Cal Garrett, Fructuso Basaldua, Cindy Brito and Bianca Perez to recruit interviewees from across the city of Chicago at a time when COVID-19 made any sort of qualitative analysis incredibly challenging. Interviewing Chicagoans living under increased public health focus because of COVID-19, those subjectified and hailed as Essential Workers as well as policy makers and health professionals, Emergency captures the struggles of communities living under the weight of legacies of racism, structural neglect and oppression and the limits of addressing systemic harms through the lens of emergency response.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Necrofinance and the Mutation of Life and Death Into Value in the Atlantic Slave Trade

  2025-03-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article puts forward an argument for a close study of the financial practices that developed to facilitate the transatlantic slave trade. While much important scholarship has demonstrated the dehumanizing nature of the commodification of human life through chattel slavery, this article interrogates the processes by which people could be financially transformed into cargo and commodities. Drawing on 18th- and early 19th-century sources from the archives of Lloyd’s, the insurance market, this article argues that the practices and logics of insurance were critical for framing conceptions of enslaved people as both property and cargo, but more critically, produced the language and discursive framing for such claims to be rendered material. Expanding on and building a concept described as necrofinance, this article shows that through business networks, financial practices, and insurance agreements, as well as intimate knowledge derived from first-hand experience of enslaving and subjugating people, underwriters, far from being aloof or distant financiers of slavery, were actively producing the logics and business infrastructures through which it could persist. While people during the transatlantic slave trade were fundamentally made to be seen as commodities for sale, this article explores the processes and structures necessary to make this a financial and economic reality through systems of insurance far removed from the sites of direct enslavement. Citation: White, Alexandre I R, ‘Necrofinance and the Mutation of Life and Death Into Value in the Atlantic Slave Trade’ (20 Mar. 2025), in Ali Meghji and Sam Okoth Opondo (eds), Legacy and Memory, in Meena Dhanda (ed.), Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context (Oxford, online edn., Oxford Academic, 20 Mar. 2025 -), https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198945246.003.0052, accessed [date].

  PublisherDOI

• Toward a historical sociology of infectious disease governance: an interview with Alexandre White

  História Ciências Saúde-Manguinhos · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This interview explores Alexandre White's contributions to the history of medicine, focusing on his latest work, Epidemic Orientalism: race, capital, and the governance of infectious disease, published by Stanford University Press in 2023. White's extensive research on infectious disease regulation is examined, covering his motivations, ongoing projects, and the pivotal role of comparative methods in the field. His theoretical frameworks are also highlighted for the valuable insights they provide for understanding the complex dynamics of global health, particularly amidst emerging international tensions surrounding infectious diseases.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Anticolonial Action across the Black Atlantic

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-09-16

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Blurring Boundaries: A Proposed Research Agenda for Ethical, Legal, Social, and Historical Studies at the Intersection of Infectious and Genetic Disease.

  UNC Libraries · 2024-10-31

  articleOpen access

  Contemporary understanding of the mechanisms of disease increasingly points to examples of "genetic diseases" with an infectious component and of "infectious diseases" with a genetic component. Such blurred boundaries generate ethical, legal, and social issues and highlight historical contexts that must be examined when incorporating host genomic information into the prevention, outbreak control, and treatment of infectious diseases.

  PublisherDOI

• Which History and Social Science Concepts Should Inform Health Professions Education?

  The AMA Journal of Ethic · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Teaching and learning patient advocacy in academic health centers requires critical engagement with social, political, and cultural conceptions of racial difference. This article considers understandings of race and racism typically drawn upon in health care and suggests which historical and social science-based approaches should be used in health professions teaching and learning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Blurring Boundaries: A Proposed Research Agenda for Ethical, Legal, Social, and Historical Studies at the Intersection of Infectious and Genetic Disease

  The Journal of Law Medicine & Ethics · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Contemporary understanding of the mechanisms of disease increasingly points to examples of "genetic diseases" with an infectious component and of "infectious diseases" with a genetic component. Such blurred boundaries generate ethical, legal, and social issues and highlight historical contexts that must be examined when incorporating host genomic information into the prevention, outbreak control, and treatment of infectious diseases.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Call for Further Research into the Coloniality of French Social Thought in George Steinmetz’s the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought

  Social Science History · 2023-08-09

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In George Steinmetz's Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, we find a meticulously researched and immensely detailed historical sociology text on the colonial origins of French social thought.In this review, I will discuss significant contributions that I think the book makes, before posing questions aimed not so much at critiquing the book as it stands but rather by making provocations about where sociological inquiry can build from this work toward deeper understandings of the colonial origins of French social theory and what these colonial origins mean for the development of the field.Steinmetz's wide and deep analysis of the history of colonial French sociology provides several important methodological and theoretical approaches for the historical sociology of knowledge production and the history of sociology more broadly.Choosing to focus primarily on the time period between the 1930s and mid 1960s, Steinmetz covers a deeply fraught period in French history from the Third Republic, through Vichy and Nazi-occupied France through to the Fifth republic (8).As Steinmetz notes, this was a period when decolonization especially reached greater importance in public, political, and scholarly debates (8).Steinmetz's rich archival and interview-based research examined not only the key writings of sociologists but also the developments of academic departments, the dissertations, courses, and the work of students at a variety of metropolitan French and colonial universities and colleges across Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.The detailed, informative endnotes make up almost a quarter of the total text.The reasons for this approach are theoretically and methodologically grounded.Steinmetz puts forward in the introduction a model for a Neo-Bourdieusian historical sociology of science which calls for examining thinkers and their works both individually and in relation to a series of more proximate contexts and more distanced socio-historical contexts (17).Critical to this are the fundamental analyses of the unequal

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• COVID-19 Communication Campaigns for Vaccination: An Assessment with Perspectives for Future Equity-Centered Public Health Efforts

  Journal of Health Communication · 2023-04-07 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access

  Although public and private institutions have spent billions of dollars on COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, many of which claim to be "equity-focused," few articles to date have objectively described the landscape of these campaigns or identified existing gaps with a focus on those populations disproportionately impacted by the virus. To these ends, a high-level landscape analysis of COVID-related communication campaigns was conducted. Analysis of 15 COVID-related communication campaigns based on six criteria (i.e., understandability, accessibility, actionability, credibility/trustworthiness, relevance/relatability, and timeliness) identified successful efforts, including campaigns aligned with the World Health Organization's Strategic Communications Framework and rooted in community co-design and communication science. The analysis also revealed five common shortcomings: campaigns were not end-user focused, only "checked the box" when communicating with historically under-resourced communities, were largely broadcast-focused and rarely involved two-way engagement strategies or tactics, demonstrated poor use of online communication approaches and failed to moderate campaign comment boards/social media sites, and commonly targeted "intermediary" audiences with materials that were not "end user ready." Based on these findings, the authors offer recommendations to guide funding and development of future health communication campaigns focused on reaching diverse audiences.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 6 Pricing Pandemics

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2023-01-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Delan Devakumar

  University College London

  6 shared

• Graham Mooney

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  6 shared

• Jeremy A. Greene

  Johns Hopkins University

  6 shared

• Nidhi S. Sabharwal

  Centre for Policy Research

  4 shared

• Ayah Nuriddin

  Johns Hopkins University

  4 shared

• Roland J. Thorpe

  Johns Hopkins University

  4 shared

• Suzanne Scafe

  University of Brighton

  4 shared

• Sujitha Selvarajah

  University College London

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D, Sociology

  Boston University

  2018

Awards & honors

• The Political Economy of the World System Graduate Student P…
• The Peace, War and Social Conflict Section's Elise Boulding…
• Best Graduate Student Paper Award in Global and Transnationa…