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.
Anin’s research seeks to historicize the relationship between politics and understandings of human life. Her dissertation is a postwar international history of “immunity.” Treating living beings’ vulnerability to the environment as both a biological and political problem, it provides a history of how liberal, socialist, and postcolonial scientists, physicians, politicians, legal thinkers, and public health officials used knowledge and practices around immunology to contest claims to health and welfare at international forums like the United Nations and World Health Organization.
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 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
“Animal Scientism: Making Biology Experimental in Republican China,” forthcoming in EASTS (published online).