Peter Baldwin Ph.D.

Professor
Department of History
University of California, Los Angeles
Email: pbaldwin@ucla.edu Discipline: History Expertise: AIDS, Public Health Strategies

Investigator Award

The Influence of History and Tradition on Public Health Strategies: A Nationally Comparative Approach to the AIDS Epidemic
Award Year: 2000 This project explores why the public health response to the AIDS epidemic has varied so greatly in industrialized nations. By setting the approach to the AIDS epidemic in a broader historical context, Dr. Baldwin analyzes the factors that have determined AIDS responses in five countries - the U.S., France, Germany, Britain and Sweden. The study considers: local political traditions, social composition (ethnic and class), mutual interactions and inflections of other policies with public health measures, the nature of the state imposing the preventive response, the social policy infrastructure, as well as the power and political influence of the various interest groups most directly affected by the epidemic. The results should shed light on the determinants of public health policy and their broader political implications.

Background

Peter Baldwin received his B.A. from Yale in 1978 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1986. Dr. Baldwin is a professor in the department of history at UCLA where he has taught since 1986. He has published The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State 1875-1975 (Cambridge University Press, 1990); editor, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians' Debate (Beacon Press, 1990), Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Disease and Democracy: The State Faces AIDS in the Developed World (University of California Press and Milbank Foundation, 2005). He is currently working on a comparative history of privacy.