Chase Ledin is a sociologist and historian of public health. His research brings together the history of medicine, queer STS, and critical public health – using interviews, focus groups, and archival research – to understand transformations in HIV and STI intervention strategies since the 1990s. Chase works as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

Chase is interested in how biomedical treatments (e.g. HIV treatments including ARVs, PEP, PrEP, and contested forms of STI prophylaxis aka “doxy PEP/PrEP”) are documented in social theory and cultural representations of chronic HIV. For instance, his PhD research analysed the boundaries of biomedical technologies, cultural histories and public health promotion in order to make sense of the changing and uneven distributions of HIV/AIDS histories. Looking at materials from the late 1990s to the present, his thisis integrated science and technology studies and cultural studies to explore how ‘post-AIDS’ social theories empowered alternative conceptions of sexual possibility and sociability in the US and UK. This research broadly contributes to ongoing conversations about intervention efficacy, biotechnological determinism, and national and global campaigns to “end AIDS” in the Global North. The implications of this research reach across health policy and promotion practices, cultural production, and histories of science, medicine and technology.

Previously, Chase received a Bachelor of Arts (2014) in the Sociology of Sexuality and English Literature from The Ohio State University. In 2016, he completed a Master of Arts in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory at King’s College London. His master’s thesis employed critical theory and discourse analysis to examine the discursive functions of “end-of-AIDS” discourses in 1990s and 2000s American popular science media. Chase argued that early post-AIDS discourses laid the groundwork for a shift in cultural identification with biomedical apparatuses as a means to “liberate” the “end of AIDS” and create cultures that more readily associate with biomedical experimentation.

Outwith his research, he is interested in the development of queer sexual health education and policy in England and Scotland and the movement to standardise HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) use across the United Kingdom. His creative work contributes to ongoing projects to historicise and archive HIV/AIDS narratives. He is also working on writing related to polyamory, HIV and STI prevention, healthcare and clinical practice, and the ethics of sexual health education.

For more about Chase’s current research activities, please see his curriculum vitae.