New York City is home to some of the world’s greatest concentrations of wealth—and to neighborhoods with maternal mortality rates far higher than those of many poor countries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada secured enough vaccine doses to vaccinate its population several times over, while many low-income countries struggled to obtain even their first doses. This course examines how health and disease are distributed in an unequal world, examining how disease and disparity are often mutually reinforcing. We will examine the major actors, ethical questions, and forms of knowledge that shape global health, situating contemporary institutions and interventions within the longer history of international health and tropical medicine. What is new about the roles of actors such as the Gates Foundation, compared with earlier influence from the Ford Foundation, World Health Organization, and World Bank? What are the continuities and departures between contemporary responses to COVID-19 and Ebola and earlier campaigns against malaria and polio? Finally, we will explore how health knowledge is produced: how problems are defined, evidence and data collected, and success and failure measured in an era of big data. Instead of treating global health as a standalone topic, the course will embed the study of health as part of larger processes of development, globalization, and global governance.