Research Interests
My most recently published books are 'Time, Religion and History' (Longman, 2007) and 'The Administration of Sickness: Medicine and Ethics in Colonial Algeria' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Time, Religion and History aspired to offer a major contribution to the fields of historiography and the philosophy of history. It argues that historians have tended to ignore the central prop of their discipline (time), and that an examination of religious cultures reveals the atypical qualities of the western, empirical model of time upon which the discipline depends. The book was described by Markus Daeschel as being 'breathtakingly ambitious and crystal clear in its argumentation' while in the Journal of Global History Pene Corfield called it 'Thought-provoking, ambitious, immensely learned.' It has recently been the subject of a major review essay in History and Theory, in which Mark Cladis wrote: ‘Gallois hopes that he can inspire others to pursue this worthy and ambitious project—the development of nuanced accounts of diverse, cultural temporalities and of history written in different temporal modes. His book will inspire. Gallois has boldly brought to our attention the importance of becoming aware of culturally specific senses of time. This immense contribution to the profession is also an immense challenge. Throughout the book runs a deeply normative tone, and rightfully so. Becoming attentive to history’s history—to its own embedded senses of time—and to the diverse experiences of time outside the modern West is a high calling, and it should be central to the vocation of the historian. Gallois has highlighted what the Socratic “know thyself” requires of the historian. Moreover, he has helped the historian to begin to think about the tools and approaches necessary to discover and recover various ecologies of time. “I am burning my dreaming” conveys a profound loss. No historian can restore that loss. But historians can attempt to discover and recover the senses of time that animate cultures around the world, past and present.’
The Administration of Sickness contends that the history of medicine affords us a great opportunity to understand the ethics of the modern colonial encounter. Using previously-unstudied documents from the French colonial archives, I argue that French medicine, which was founded on rather narrow Hippocratic ethics, encountered a much more complex medical ethical culture in Algeria. This meeting, and the misunderstanings it generated, became emblematic of the French colonial experience in Algeria.
I also publish in a number of areas of intellectual history which look at the movement of ideas from the Arab-Islamic world to western Europe, especially the ideal and practice of cosmopolitanism.
Research Projects Undertaken
I am currently working on two major projects:
1. A history of violence in colonial Algeria (which I expect to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012).
2. A constellation of projects under the heading 'Where is the history of medical ethics?' These include co-authored articles with Poonam Bala (Delhi) and James Wilson (UCL).