The School of Public Health of the University of Hong Kong will be hosting a Lecture by Professor Jesse B Bump, Lecturer on Global Health Policy and Executive Director of Takemi Program, Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on “The Political Economy of Global Health in Historical Perspective”. Details are as follows:

Biography

Professor Jesse B Bump is Executive Director of the Takemi Program in International Health and Lecturer on Global Health Policy in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a Member of the Bergen Center for Ethics and Priority Setting at the University of Bergen. He holds a PhD in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Johns Hopkins University, and an MPH from Harvard University. The overarching goal of Professor Bump’s research is to analyze the evolution of ideas and institutions that promote better societal performance in health. His work has focused on the special opportunities to build health systems and advance social protections during and after widespread disruption by infectious disease epidemics, colonial extraction, conflict, industrialization, globalization, and other processes. Using historical and political economy perspectives, Professor Bump investigates how and when societies develop ways to understand and manage the largest threats to lives and livelihoods. His multi-disciplinary work leverages deeply historical scholarship with social science theories and methods to produce strategies for the present and future. His research projects have generated solutions in many focused areas, as well, such as tobacco control, diarrheal diseases, onchocerciasis, congenital syphilis, and nutrition governance. Professor Bump is an award-winning teacher and passionate advocate for his students.

About the Lecture

Humanitarian themes, such as rights and entitlements to universal well-being, feature prominently in narratives of global health, even as many analysts have pointed to systematic imbalances of power, unfair governance structures, and unwanted influences as evidence of ongoing colonial interference in the health affairs of many low- and middle-income countries. This seminar employs an historical perspective to analyse major forces that have shaped the development of global health, and which remain as obstacles to its objectives. These include macroeconomics, geopolitics, and the activism and resources of the HIV/AIDS pandemic that led to global health in its current form. Particularly in the failure to engage economic relationships and trade policy, global health limits its attention to downstream consequences of resource inequalities, where its goal of a more egalitarian, more healthy world is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

Programme Rundown

Please view here for the rundown.

Registration

Please register here by September 12, 2025 (Friday) at 4pm.

A confirmation email will be sent to successful registrants.

Enquiry
For enquiries, please email sphevent@hku.hk.