George Aumoithe earned his Ph.D. in history at Columbia University in 2018. His project examines how the political economy of Medicaid and hospital provision shaped the social, political, and thus material response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States. His research interests encompass twentieth-century and contemporary U.S. history, civil rights law, public health, medicine, public policy, and comparative welfare states. At Columbia, Aumoithe taught a course that compares the healthcare systems of different types of welfare states. His current project argues that the incommensurability between laws addressing illness prevention, curative medicine, and civil rights had devastating socioeconomic effects for poor people who relied on safety net hospitals. From the “War on Poverty” in the 1960s, to the inflationary crises of the 1970s, and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s—1990s, Aumoithe traces an arc that shows how policy applications of public health, healthcare, and social welfare law changed for federal, state and local governments in the United States. During his Davis Center postdoc, Aumoithe will develop his book manuscript and write a refereed journal article to introduce the project to a wider audience.

Aumoithe’s work has been supported, among others, by the American Philosophical Society, the Center for Engaged Scholarship, and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. For more information, you may visit his personal website.