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 is currently researching the proliferation of ecological theory in the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s.

Andrew has written on such topics as…

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 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…

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…

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…

Robin Franklin (he/him/his) is a second-year History PhD student at Princeton who is also affiliated with the Gender and Sexuality Studies certificate programme. Specialising in the cultural and intellectual history of the United States since 1865, Robin explores how seemingly abstract historical experiences of time, selfhood, and desire have…

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.…

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 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 scientists have conveyed information across political and professional borders.

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 who believed that only…

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…

My work focuses on the intersection of science, governance, and urban history in the United States from the end of the Civil War to roughly World War I. My dissertation, “Magnificent Distances: The Rise and Fall of the Capital City of Science, 1865-1920,” explores Washington, D.C.’s period of scientific preeminence. It analyzes the…

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

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…

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

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…