Floor Haalboom is a postdoctoral historian who specializes in the modern history of intensive livestock keeping, (veterinary) medicine, One Health, and public health. In 2017, she obtained her doctorate in the history of (veterinary) medicine at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her dissertation “Negotiating Zoonoses” focused on twentieth-century dealings with infectious diseases shared by humans and livestock (“zoonoses”) in the Netherlands. The dissertation was extensively discussed in the Dutch media. In 2017–2018, Haalboom worked as a postdoc at the Utrecht University Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. This project focuses on postwar changes in the public perception of livestock diseases like foot-and-mouth disease and Q fever. Simultaneously, she worked as a teacher in medical history at the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. During her fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center, Haalboom worked on a global environmental history of intensive livestock keeping, focusing on the global impacts of livestock feed in the second half of the twentieth century.
RCC Research Project: Feeding Factory Farms: A Global Environmental History of Livestock Feed
Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Feeding Factory Farms: A Global Environmental History of Livestock Feed
Selected Publications:
- “Negotiating Zoonoses: Dealings with Infectious Diseases Shared by Humans and Livestock in the Netherlands (1898–2001).” PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2017.
- “Who Owns Salmonella? The Politics of Infections Shared by Humans and Livestock in the Netherlands, 1959–1965.” BMGN–Low Countries Historical Review 132, no. 1 (2017): 83–103.
- “Was de uitbraak van Q-koorts een verrassing?” Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 161 (2017): D1786.
- “Scientists in Cowsheds: Disputes over Hygienic Milk Production in the Netherlands, 1918–1928.” In Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts, edited by Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Andreas Weber and Huib Zuidervaart. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming.
- “‘Spanish’ Flu and Army Horses: What Historians and Biologists Can Learn from a History of Animals with Flu during the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic.” Studium: Tijdschrift voor Wetenschaps- en Universiteitsgeschiedenis / Revue d’Histoire des Sciences et des Universités 7 (2014): 124–39.