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Assistant Professor

sebestian.kroupa [at] mgill.ca| 3647 Peel, room 205

Sebestian Kroupa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine. He holds a PhD and an MPhil in the History of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Biology from the University of St Andrews. In 2021–23 he was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge and in 2021–22 he worked as Research Associate on the Renaissance Skin Project at King’s College London. He has held research fellowships at Wolfson College, Cambridge; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; and the Natural History Museum, London.

Research Interests:

Dr Kroupa is a historian of pre-modern medicine and the life sciences in cross-cultural contexts, with a particular focus on the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. His main research interests lie in colonial medical encounters and conceptions of the body and in global circulations of medical knowledge and remedies. He has published on Indigenous tattooing in the Philippines, long-distance networks of knowledge exchange, and Renaissance conceptions of monstrosity. He also co-edited a Special Issue on cross-cultural knowledge making in Indo-Pacific islands. He is currently working on a monograph which examines how Philippine medicinal substances were constructed, commodified, and globalised in the early modern era.

Selected Publications:

Kroupa S., ‘Missionary Remedies,’ in O. Weisser, ed., Early Modern Medicine: A Source-Centered Introduction (Routledge, forthcoming).

Kroupa S. (2022), ‘Reading Beneath the Skin: Indigenous Tattooing in the Early Spanish Philippines, c.1520–1720,’ American Historical Review (127:3), 1252–1287.

Kroupa S. (2019), ‘Humanists and Travellers, Gorgons and Gorillas: Hanno the Navigator’s Periplus and Early Modern Geography,’ International History Review (41:4), 793–820.

Kroupa S., Mawson S.J., and Brixius D., eds. (2018), ‘Science and Islands in Indo-Pacific Worlds,’ Special Issue of The British Journal for the History of Science (51:4).

Kroupa S. (2016), ‘Ex Epistulis Philippinensibus: Georg Joseph Kamel SJ (1661–1706) and His Correspondence Network,’ Centaurus (57), 229–259.

Courses Given:

HIST 249 – Health and Healer in Western History

HIST 432/HIST 641 – Topics in Pre-Modern Medicine