Lea Eisenstein is a PhD student in the History of Science program. Her work focuses on the history of health, medicine, and medical technology in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. She analyzes the social and cultural dimensions of these subjects, especially with respect to gender, sexuality, race, and disability.

Andrew Hoyt is a second-year Ph.D. student with interests in the history of the life sciences, twentieth-century environmental and political history, and North American Indigenous history.

He has researched such topics as the politics of Ojibwe resource management, the development of the field of resource economics, and the rise of eco…

Gretchin is a PhD student in the History of Science whose research focuses on early modern magic and the occult sciences, looking particularly at practice and experience. Her work often contemplates the relationship between the intellectual and social traditions of magic by considering the potential purposes and uses of anonymous manuscripts of…

Alice McCrum is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History with interests in intellectual history as it relates to legal history and the history of attention.

Before starting her graduate work, Alice lived in Paris, where she studied public policy at Sciences Po, taught at the Sorbonne, directed programming at the American Library in…

Zoe's interests lie at the intersections of early American history, Indigenous studies, and the history of science. Her work examines how Native peoples interfaced with colonial naturalists, physicians, and cartographers and what their interactions reveal about political and scientific authority in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century…

Chandler Allen is a doctoral student in the History of Science, with a 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…

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 climate, science, and agriculture in the late Ottoman Empire. His current research focuses on how three successive generations of Ottoman technocrats and provincial administrators attempted to weather the El Nino-driven droughts of the 1870s, 1890s…

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…

Robin Franklin is a third-year PhD candidate in Princeton’s History department and an affiliate of the Gender and Sexuality Studies certificate programme. Specialising in the intellectual and cultural history of the United States since 1865, Robin explores how gendered, sexual, and racial power relations have moulded historical experiences of…

Heather Jahrling is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate specializing in twentieth-century American urban, technological, and carceral history at Princeton University.

In 2021, Heather received her B.A. in History and Science, Technology, and Society (STS) from Colby College, where she studied as a Bixler Scholar and graduated summa cum laude…

Jingwen Li is a historian of medicine engaging with disability media studies and medical anthropology. She works on the history of sensory impairment and the human body across cultural traditions. She specializes in the history of the long 19th and early 20th centuries, with particular attention to East Asia’s role in the global rise of …

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 from a transnational and international perspective.

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, philology, and other constituent domains…

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 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It traces the use of ice and snow from harvest to application in scientific, medical, and consumer contexts. She has previously worked on games…

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 is a historian of the physical and social sciences.

Her dissertation, “Unifying Science During the Rise of Fascism,” focuses on the Unity of Science movement, a fractious group of around 75 physicists, mathematicians, logicians, and linguistic philosophers active during the 1930s and Second World War. Under the watchful…

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,…

Chehirian’s dissertation presents a history of "attention therapies"—a set of mid-century experiments at the interface of studio art and the therapeutic mind sciences. The project demonstrates that human attention—its direction, character, and objects—came to constitute a key concern for psychiatrists, educators and public health officials…

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…

Dissertation Title:
Magnificent Distances: The Rise and Fall of the Capital City of Science, 1862–1920

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…

Dissertation Title:
The Cold Standard: The Great Winter of 1709 in European Context

Dissertation Title:
A Satellite for All: Law, Technology, and Empire in the Global Cold War, 1959–1973

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…

Dissertation Title:
Fighting for Capitalism's Cutting Edge: The Post-Industrial Campaign for American Competitiveness

Jiya is a historian of disability, gender, sexuality, caste, and transnational welfare in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. Her dissertation offers a transnational “concept-history” of “disability” in and beyond India from the 1930s to 1990s, focusing on its co-constitutions with ideas about race, caste, and class to imbue imperial,…

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…

Dissertation Title:
Biopolitical Socialism: Antibiosis, Scientific Capital, and China’s Cold War Rationality, 1949–1990

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…

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…