Faculty Member, History & IHSP
Professor of History
About
Profile
David Wright is Professor of History at McGill University, where he holds a cross appointment between the Department of History and the Institute for Health and Social Policy (IHSP). Dr Wright was educated at McGill and the University of Oxford (Great Britain). He specialized in the history of medicine at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, where he also held an honorary appointment in the Faculty of Modern History and a Junior Research Fellowship at Linacre College. In 1996, he was appointed Wellcome Trust Award Holder (Wellcome Lecturer) at the University of Nottingham before returning to Canada to take up the Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at McMaster University (1999-2011).
Dr Wright has had an active research career, with grants from various organizations and funding councils including: The Wellcome Trust; Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR); Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); and Associated Medical Services (Hannah Foundation for the History of Medicine) Toronto. He is the author and co-editor of eight books and three dozen peer reviewed articles, chapters, and guest introductions, predominantly on the history of madness, mental hospitals, and psychiatry. He is the former Chair of the international Society for the Social History of Medicine and former Associate Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, McMaster University.
Although Dr Wright continues to work on the history of madness, disability, and mental hospitals, he has recently embarked on a new research project on the history of the globalization of health human resources in the second half of the twentieth century that will form the cornerstone of his research agenda at the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill.
His latest book -- DOWNS: The History of a Disability -- was published in 2011 by Oxford University Press.
