Emily Webster

Dr. Emily Webster is a postdoctoral research associate at University College Dublin and a researcher on the AHRC-IRC-funded project Typhoid, Cockles, and Terrorism: The Turbulent History of Anglo-Irish Typhoid Control. She received her PhD in History and MS in Public Health Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2021.

Dr. Webster's research sits at the intersection of environmental history, history of medicine, urban studies, and health studies. Her dissertation, "Microbial Empires: Changing Ecologies and Multispecies Epidemics in British Imperial Cities, 1837-1910," combines historical and biological methods to examine the relationship between environmental change and the emergence of epidemic disease in the United Kingdom, India, and Australia in the nineteenth century.

An interdisciplinary researcher, Dr. Webster has also received training in epidemiology and quantitative research methods. Her masters thesis, "Yersinia pestis Infection in Rats and Neighborhood-Level Characteristics as Risk Factors for Human Mortality in the Bombay Plague Epidemic, 1905-1906,” used epidemiological modelling to assess risk for plague mortality during the Third Plague Pandemic. Her interdisciplinary research has received funding from the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.

Outside of research, Dr. Webster serves as a review editor for Environmental History Now, an online platform for women and nonbinary graduate students and early career researchers.