
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.
Her research seeks to historicize the relationship between politics and understandings of human life. Her dissertation is a postwar international history of immunity: drawing on scientific, medical, legal, and bureaucratic sources, she tracks immunological science and medicine as a site for environmental advocates, anticolonial activists, and human rights proponents to make claims to health and welfare. She has also explored her historical interest in human life through “the animal”: she has written on legal deliberations on animal violence in interwar Britain, laboratory animals in Republican China, and is currently researching the emergence of moral and legal “personhood” for animals and the environment in the 1970s.
Anin received her BA in History and Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University and her MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
Selected Publications
“Animals, Film, Audiences: Regulating Cruelty and Morality through Science and Law in Interwar Britain.” Isis 114, no. 3 (September 2023): 490–512