Typically individuals assume they need to have “one skilled identification and one factor you do for enjoyable,” stated George Aumoithe. “However I take a look at either side as totally different modes of expression — and I wish to follow sharing scholarship in many alternative registers.”

Aumoithe is ready to do exactly that. With twin appointments within the Historical past Division and Division of African and African American Research, he begins the day instructing “Healthcare within the Welfare State.” Within the night, the assistant professor conducts a seminar on “how Black digital musicians responded to city historical past’s unfolding.”

Aumoithe, who joined the school final yr, stated he finds it notably fascinating to check subjects like well being inequity, medical racism, and music in a “solidly resourced establishment” like Harvard. “It’s this world-class college,” he stated. “You’ve gotten this golden ticket to form and spotlight the vanguard of considering throughout fields equivalent to Black research and U.S. historical past.”

As an undergraduate at Bowdoin Faculty, Aumoithe, a Haitian American, pursued a double main in historical past and African American Research.

“Public well being coverage has grow to be the location the place we interrogate healthcare’s place within the welfare state,” he defined, noting that healthcare, public well being, and welfare are distinct entities within the U.S., whereas they’re extra interconnected in different international locations.

These considerations adopted Aumoithe to Columbia College, the place he earned a doctorate in historical past below the mentorship of pioneering welfare state research scholar Alice Kessler-Harris. At Columbia, Aumoithe started to analysis the methods healthcare and public help grew to become “unusual bedfellows” within the twentieth century U.S.

His graduate dissertation served because the impetus for his upcoming guide, “Medical Shortage: The Resegregation of Healthcare in America,” which offers a historical past of how the wartime-scarcity mindset grew to become a postwar seek for “effectivity” in a desegregating America. The guide tells a nationwide story of federal well being planning’s transformation and hospital closures with circumstances in New York Metropolis, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta, and the agricultural South.

Amid his scholarly work, Aumoithe began creating music below the act Efemèr, which suggests “ephemeral” in Haitian Creole. Launched throughout the pandemic, the debut EP “Craving” is an digital six-song venture exploring themes of intimacy, misconnection, and nostalgia in a world struck by pandemic, socio-political turmoil, and violence.