Executive Committee
Associated Faculty in the Department
Associated Faculty Outside the Department
Department of Sociology and Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
Sociology of Medicine
Health Policy, Gender and Reproductive Issues
Department of African American Studies
Sociology of Science and Technology
Science and Technology Studies; Sociology; African American Studies
Department of Philosophy
Relations between Philosophy, Science, and Society in the Period of the Scientific Revolution
Department of Classics
Ancient Medicine, Greek Language and Literature
Department of Anthropology
Semiotics, Nuclear Things, Toxicity, Waste, Disaster Studies, Environment, Energy, Robotics, Wildlife, Anthropology of Science and Technology, Applied Anthropology, East Asia (Japan)
Department of Anthropology
Anthropology of science, technology, and language; science and technology studies; disability studies; sound studies; AI; natural language processing and communication engineering; mental health care; history of psychiatry; surveillance; listening; United States.
Department of Sociology
Sociology of Science and Technology
Science and Technology Studies; Human-Computer Interaction
Graduate Students
2023-2024
Andrew Hoyt is a first-year PhD student with interests spanning the histories of the life and environmental sciences, US environmental and political history, and North American Indigenous history. His research currently focuses on the political dimensions of ecology and other forms of environmental expertise in the United States. Working across…
Gretchin is a PhD student in the History of Science whose research focuses on early modern magic and the occult sciences, looking particularly at the ways that anonymous manuscripts of magic were possible repertoires of experimental procedures. She believes that science and magic coexisted and fed off of one another in the early modern era and…
Zoe Zimmermann focuses on colonial knowledge production in seventeenth-century North America. She is interested in studying how colonial naturalists, botanists, and cartographers interfaced with and exploited Indigenous guides and informants and how Indigenous epistemologies were filtered through the colonial lens.
In 2022, she…
2022-2023
Chandler Allen is a doctoral student in the History of Science, with particular focus on intersections between modern and contemporary art and science and those who skirt the history-fiction divide. Prior to Princeton, she worked as a curator and associate for galleries, museums, and auction houses in New York and London, and earned an MPhil in…
Joe Bishop works at the intersection of American science and medicine around the turn of the twentieth century. He is currently interested in how the pursuit of scientific authority shaped the food and drug industries and transformed scientific standards. He also focuses on how contending approaches to the environment recast the concepts of…
Kearby Chess is a Ph.D. student in Middle East history from Longview, Washington, who studies the environment, science, and agriculture in the late Ottoman Empire. His research focuses on the changes in agricultural practices that followed the implementation of Tanzimat-era land reforms in Ottoman Arab provinces.
Kearby earned…
Elizabeth is a Ph.D. student in the History of Science Program. Her research centers on the histories of mathematics and physics in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is particularly interested in scientific communities, focusing on how they are defined and established, how they interact with one another, and the ways in which "outsiders" affect…
Mishka's research focuses on the history of psychiatry in colonial and apartheid South Africa. She is also interested in the history of psychology, colonial medicine, and disability studies. She completed her undergraduate degree at Rhodes University in South Africa, and her master's degree at New York University, where she researched the…
2021-2022
Jingwen Li is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History of Science Program at Princeton. Her research focuses on interactions between media technologies and the human body with a comparative approach. She is currently interested in the history of sensory (visual and auditory) impairment. In past projects, Jingwen has done research on…
Anin Luo is an intellectual historian interested in the intersection of science and politics. Her research lies between the history and philosophy of the life and medical sciences, legal and international history, and environmental history. She specializes in twentieth-century Europe and maintains research interests in twentieth-century China.
2020-2021
I study the history of maritime Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines under Spain and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’m primarily interested in knowledge-making techniques and practices under empire, across a variety of fields including anthropology, law, geography, linguistics, and other constituent…
Anna Speyart works on the social and cultural history of science in early modern Europe. She is writing a dissertation on the science and technology of freezing in early modernity. It traces the use of ice and snow from harvest to application in scientific, medical, and consumer contexts. She has previously worked on games and play in erudite…
Sara Tridenti is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the History of Science Program at Princeton. Her research unearths part of the deep history contained in the ground beneath our feet by tracing the development and practice of soil microbiology in the United States. In her dissertation, Sara aims to weave together a history of soil science,…
Austen Van Burns studies how physicists, mathematicians, logicians, and linguistic philosophers represented and conveyed knowledge during the rise of European fascism. She focuses on members of the Unity of Science movement who, despite conditions which hobbled their scholarship and endangered their lives, did not emigrate before the outbreak…
2019-2020
Kathryn (Kate) Carpenter is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Princeton University whose research focuses on the intersection of environmental history and history of science. Her dissertation is a social and scientific history of storm chasing in the United States since the 1950s. It draws on archival sources, scientific publications,…
My dissertation project traces the emergence of art-making as a form of psychological therapy across the 20th century. It studies the entwinement of psycho-scientific and artistic practices in varying efforts to use creative expression to access and heal the psyche.
In my public history practice, such continuities between…
I study the history of medicine, focusing on the United States in the 20th century. I earned a BA in History and German from NYU in 2016. For my honors thesis, I researched and wrote on the history of the nutritional deficiency disease pellagra in the American South. After a brief stint in editing, I then moved to the History and Philosophy of…
I study the history of science and science communication, urban history, and modern American social, political, and cultural history. I am working on a dissertation that is an urban history of science of Washington, D.C. at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses on how local conditions of space, race, urban change, and intellectual…
My dissertation project is a history of the atomic veterans, soldiers who were exposed to radiation through their participation in nuclear tests. During the period of exposure, soldiers conducted exercises and were subjected to a battery of physical and psychological tests in order for war planners to anticipate the challenges they would face…
2018-2019
I study the histories of law, technology, and extraterritoriality in the twentieth century. My dissertation follows legal disputes surrounding the first communications satellites launched in the 1960s. I ask how legal and technological practices surrounding the satellites both implemented and reconfigured ideas of extraterritoriality and empire…
Midori Kawaue studies how interactions between the indigenous population and the colonial settlers from the 17th to 19th centuries produced new scientific knowledge at a global level. She is writing a comparative history of the Ainu people, the indigenous people of northern Japan, and the Native Americans. Her first co-edited book is James…
Julia Marino is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University specializing in United States History of Science, with a particular focus on the intersections of science and economic policy. Her dissertation, “Fighting for Capitalism’s Cutting Edge,” explores how, in response to Japan’s economic and technological rise, American policymakers embraced…
Wesley Viner specializes in the history of early modern Christianity and science. His dissertation, “Reading, Revelation, and Nature: Biblical Interpretation and Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England,” examines the rise of Mosaic natural philosophy and its effects upon biblical interpretation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England…
2017-2018
Yang is a PhD candidate in the History of Science program. She is currently working on her dissertation, titled “Antibiotics, Scientific Expertise, and Pharmaceutical Marketplace in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1990,” which examines the interrelated development of science, technology, and medicine in modern China through a history of…
2016-2017
Pallavi is a PhD candidate in the History of Science program and a Gender and Sexuality Studies certificate student. She is interested in the history of medicine, technology, disability and the body. Her dissertation is on the history of medicine and technology in the Paralympic Games. Before starting graduate…
2014-2015
I am a Ph.D. student in the Program for the History of Science with research interests in Early Modern science; the history of the imagination; visual culture and scientific illustration.
Before coming to Princeton I completed an M.Sci. at the University of Sydney with a thesis called "Optical Instruments and the Early Modern…