Graduate Students
Sakena Abedin
Harvard College, B.A.; Stanford University, M.A.; Washington University, M.D.
She is also interested in the history of U.S. healthcare policy, particularly initiatives meant to improve the quality and equity of the healthcare system.
sakena.abedin@yale.edu
Justin Barr
Washington University, B.A.; Yale University, M.A.
Raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Justin graduated from Washington University in 2006 with an A.B. in History. After spending a summer teaching English in Hanoi, he worked for the US government for a year writing the history of the Special Forces medic and examining its links to physician assistant programs. This project corresponds to Justin's more general interest in military medical history and its ties to civilian medicine. His dissertation will examine the rise of vascular surgery in twentieth-century United States, paying particular attention to roles of World War II and Korea. Also a student at the University of Virginia's medical school, Justin plans to pursue a career that interdigitates his passion for medicine and history. He will be in Charlottesville from June 2010 until July 2013.
justin.barr@yale.edu
Mary Brazelton
Harvard University, B.A.
Mary Augusta Brazelton graduated from Harvard University in 2008 with an A.B. in History and Science and a language citation in Chinese. Mary's dissertation studies a gathering of scientists and physicians in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming during the Second Sino-Japanese War. She is exploring the ways in which this group's work on vaccination changed the course of public health in Kunming. Mary's broader research interests include the social history of twentieth-century China and historical connections between science, medicine, and public health.
mary.brazelton@yale.edu
Jessica Cecilia Cardenas-Navia
Yale, B.A.
Cecilia has deferred matriculation in 2006 in order to pursue a M.A. degree in History of Science at Cambridge University. She will join us in the 2007-2008 academic year.
jessica.cardenas-navia@yale.edu
Gerardo Con Diaz
Harvard University, B.A.; University of Cambridge (Trinity College), M.Phil.
Gerardo received his B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University in 2008. His undergraduate thesis developed a series of examples in Kirby Calculus - a visual method to represent and abstractly manipulate three and four dimensional topological spaces. He then spent a year at the University of Cambridge, in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, where he wrote an M.Phil. thesis on the plays and poems written by American people with HIV/AIDS and their loved ones. Gerardo's current interests address the interactions between gender and sexuality, statistics, religion, and epidemics in the twentieth century. He is particularly interested in the history of epidemiology and in statistical analyses that relate either to people's religion or to their sexuality.
When he is not studying, Gerardo can be found running, biking, cooking, looking for books to add to his collection of literature about AIDS, or playing video games.
gerardo.condiaz@yale.edu
Helen Anne Curry
Harvard, B.A.
Helen studies the history of the twentieth-century life sciences, as well as the history of agriculture and environmental history. Her dissertation, Accelerating Evolution, Engineering Life, offers a history of the development, application, and public reception in the United States of early means of manipulating the genes and chromosomes of plants. In particular, it explores how scientists, breeders, and lay observers at mid-century came to view methods that produced genetic mutations--whether x-rays directed at dormant seeds, a chemical applied to flower buds, or radioactive cobalt placed in a field of crops--as agricultural tools. By revealing a widespread belief that mutagens could enable breeders to speed up evolution, producing genetic variations "at will" and engineering plant types "to order," the project sheds new light on both the history of and current debates about genetic modification. In addition to this dissertation project, Helen's recent research has carried her into the histories of gardening, aerospace science, and conservation biology, among other subjects. She was awarded the 2010 Nathan Reingold Prize from the History of Science Society for her essay "Vernacular Experimental Gardens of the Twentieth Century," in which she explored home gardens as sites of scientific practice. She is a 2011 awardee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and currently resides in Philadelphia where she is a fellow of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
helen.curry@yale.edu
Deborah Doroshow
Harvard-Radcliffe College, B.A.
Debbie hails from sunny Los Angeles, but has spent 7 years in Boston, where she was an undergraduate concentrator in History and Science and a medical student, both at Harvard. She couldn't decide whether to do science or humanities in college and picked the one major that encompassed them both, a decision that worked out so well that she is now planning to both practice medicine and be a historian. How that will be executed remains an enticing mystery. She is interested in the history of psychiatry, children's health, and medicine in 20th century America, particularly notions of therapeutic efficacy and (ab)normality, and especially loves doing oral histories with old retired physicians. She has published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences on insulin coma therapy in mid-twentieth-century psychiatry, and her piece on the history of bedwetting alarms will appear in the June 2010 issue of Isis.In her free time, you can find her singing alto in The Citations, Yale's graduate a capella group.
deborah.doroshow@yale.edu
Ziv Eisenberg
Tel Aviv University, B.A; SUNY-Stony Brook, M.A; Yale University, M.A.; Yale University, M.Phil.
Ziv's dissertation, "The Whole Nine Months: Women, Men, and the Making of Middle-Class Pregnancy in Modern America," examines how changing understanding of and attitudes toward gestation have affected its visibility. His article, "Clear and Pregnant Danger: the Making of Prenatal Psychology in Mid-Twentieth-Century America", was published in a special issue of the Journal of Women's History on reproduction, sex and power (22:3, Sept 2010). A second article, "Red All Over: Protecting the American Body Politic from Infection in the Early Twentieth Century," is forthcoming in Endeavour. Earlier versions of this paper won the American Studies Association's Gene Wise-Warren Susman award (2009), as well as the the New England American Studies Association's (NEASA) Mary Kelley Prize, for the best paper presented at the annual conference by a graduate student or non-tenure track scholar (2008). In addition, Ziv has reviewed books for Isis (100:2, June 2009) and the Journal of the History of Sexuality (19:3, Sept 2010). He has also presented papers at the annual meetings of the organization of American Historians (OAH), American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM), Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, History of Science Society (HSS), and the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine. In the spring of 2011, he taught an independently-designed junior seminar called “The American Family, 1873 to the Present.” He has been a member of the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine's steering committee from 2007 to 2010.
ziv.eisenberg@yale.edu
Tyler Griffith
University of Chicago, B.A; Warburg Institute, University of London, M.A; University of Edinburgh, M.S.
Originally from Southern Florida, Tyler got his B.A. in Classics and Medieval Studies at the University of Chicago in 2005. The following year he completed an M.A. in Cultural and Intellectual History of the Renaissance at the Warburg Institute, University of London. After teaching history for a year at a community college in rural North Carolina, he completed an MSc in Enlightenment Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and extended his research into the modern era with the MLitt program in Modern Thought at the Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen. Tyler's other research interests include topics such as: war and violence in the epic tradition, visual representations of authority, the university and the public sphere, 18th century Latin literature, and contemporary philosophy such as Blanchot and Deleuze.
tyler.griffith@yale.edu
Jed Gross
University of Pennsylvania, B.A; Yale, M.A.; Yale Law School, J.D.
Jed Adam Gross is a native of Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, a member of the Massachusetts bar, and a graduate student in Yale's History Department. He is interested in the dynamic interaction between law and technological innovation. His dissertation will consider one instance of this interaction: how state and federal laws accommodated and shaped organ and tissue transplantation in Twentieth Century America. He is excited by the challenge of bringing together the history of science and medicine, social history, and legal history. His work can be found in publications including the American Journal of Bioethics, the Quinnipiac Health Law Journal, and the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics.
jed.gross@yale.edu
Matt Gunterman
Murray State University, B.A.; University of Glasgow, M.Phil; Yale, M.A.
Matt Gunterman specializes in fields of Medicine, Public Health, Science and Religion, Biosemiotics, and Consumer Technologies. His dissertation is entitled, “An Uncommon Cup: God, Germs, and the Bacteriological Enlightenment of America,” and he is advised by John Harley Warner. More on his research can be found at MattGunterman.com.
matthew.gunterman@yale.edu
Jenna Healey
University of Guelph, B.A.; University of Toronto, M.A.
Jenna is a proud Canadian, hailing from the town of Richmond Hill, Ontario (just north of Toronto). As an undergraduate she studied molecular biology and English literature at the University of Guelph, where she discovered that the History of Science was the perfect discipline for combining her many academic passions. As an undergraduate, her research focused on the history of veterinary medicine in 19th century Canada as well as animal psychology in 20th century France. She published an article about the latter topic with Dr. Sofie Lachapelle in the March 2010 issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. In 2010 she completed a MA at the University of Toronto's Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science. At Yale, Jenna's research focuses on 20th century reproductive medicine and technologies in the United States. She is interested in how the new reproductive technologies of the 1970s and 1980s contributed to the significant shifts in our understanding of the family and reproduction during that time. More broadly, she is interested in the history of health activism, gender and the family. She is currently working on a project on the National Organization for Non-Parents and the childfree movement of the 1970s.
jenna.healey@yale.edu
Rana Hogarth
Yale, B.A; Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, M.H.S.
Rana grew up in sunny Los Angeles, but has lived on the East Coast since 1998 and has come to embrace her new home in spite of the existence of winter and snow. Rana earned her B.A. in History of Science, History of Medicine from Yale in 2002 and she received her M.H.S. in Health Policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2004. Rana came back to Yale after working in the "real world" as a health policy analyst for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (part of the Department of Health and Human Services) in Baltimore. Her academic interests include the role of medicine in shaping perceptions of race in ninteenth-century America; race, stigma and disease, and the use of race in public health campaigns and social policies.
When Rana is not pondering issues of race and medicine in America, she is probably watching Monty Python's Flying Circus or eating frites at Rudy's.
rana.hogarth@yale.edu
Kathryn Irving
University of Melbourne, B.S., B.A., M.D.
Kate completed her undergraduate education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She combined a medical degree with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) and Bachelor of Medical Science, majoring in American History. Since graduating in 2006, she has been working as a doctor, most recently in Pediatrics at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne. She is delighted to have the opportunity at Yale to explore some of her academic interests, which could be broadly summarized as the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Western medicine. Currently, she is pondering how gender and disability influence experiences of health and illness. Like many Australians, Kate has a love for meeting new prople and exploring new places...just don't offer her a Foster's beer!
kathryn.irving@yale.edu
Heidi Knoblauch
University of Rochester, B.A.
Heidi Knoblauch graduated from the University of Rochester with a double degree in Health and Society and History. After completing two senior theses (one on the popularization of Einstein's theory of general relativity and the other on imagery opposing universal health care in the United States) she decided to spend a year back in 'the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters'--New York City--perfecting her latte art. Her current academic interests include the political (micro and macro) effects of the popularization of science and medicine in the United States as well as the use of scientific and medical imagery in corporate advertising and the carry over of this advertising into physicians' waiting rooms.
heidi.knoblauch@yale.edu
Mary Ellen Leuver
Yale, B.A.
Mary Ellen Leuver graduated from Yale College in 2006, earning her B.A. in History with minors in English and the Humanities. Having moved into the section of History of Science and Medicine for her doctorate, Mary Ellen now looks both ways before exploring the intersections of medicine, public health, and the American city. She is also fascinated by the dynamics of community formation, the history of political movements, and transnational discourses on disease.
Born in Virginia and raised in Colorado Springs, Mary Ellen spent a significant part of each year traveling internationally until she settled in New Haven. She is an aficionado of 1980s and 1990s action and comedy movies, and also devotes copious amounts of time and money to developing her encyclopedic knowledge of New Haven cuisine. In what little spare time she has, Mary Ellen enjoys recreational philosophy, biking, skiing, skydiving, and playing her clarinet.
maryellen.leuver@yale.edu
Kelly O'Donnell
Sarah Lawrence College, B.A.; Yale University, M.A.
Kelly, originally from Southwest Philadelphia, graduated with a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Here at Yale she studies the history of medicine and the history of women and gender in the United States, from the 1950s to the 1990s. Primarily a historian of women’s health, she also researches the history of feminism, activism, and technology.
Her dissertation is a biography of the journalist and feminist health activist Barbara Seaman, who authored many books and articles on women’s health (notably The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill [1969] and Free and Female [1972]) and co-founded the National Women’s Health Network. This project brings together histories of medicine, feminism, journalism, motherhood, and scientific expertise, using Seaman’s life and career as a lens through which to view changes in these arenas over the course the second half of the twentieth century.
Joy Rankin
Dartmouth College, B.A.; Duke University, M.A.
Joy studies the history of digital technologies, primarily the history of computing, focusing on the post-World War II era in the United States. Her dissertation examines how 1960s and 1970s users of time-sharing systems experienced individualized, interactive computing, balancing a study of user experiences with an analysis of the technologies that enabled those experiences. Her work addresses the multiple contexts in which personal computing arose, as well as business history, gender and technology, and computing and the human experience. Joy is also interested in the history of biotechnology, math and science education, science and technology policy, and maps of all kinds. She graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College, where she double-majored in mathematics and history. After college, Joy enjoyed a successful career launching educational programs ranging from an online ESL website to online Advanced Placement courses for high school students, a career that brought her from Boston to Portland, Oregon to Durham, North Carolina and Geneva, Switzerland. Joy attained her master's degree at Duke University, concentrating in the history and sociology of science.
joy.rankin@yale.edu
Thomas Reznick
Colby College, B.A.
Tom came to Yale from New York, by way of Boston and Maine. He spent four years at Colby College, earning a B.A. in Science, Technology and Society, which culminated in his senior scholar's thesis examining the industrialization and scientific management of Northern Maine potato agriculture. After graduating, Tom spent a year in Boston, MA, where he worked for an environmental non-profit. Tom's work at Yale focuses on 19th and 20th century biomedicine and imaging. He is also broadly interested in collecting practices in the 19th and 20th centuries, environmental history, and history of technology. When he's not studying, Tom loves to road bike, cook, play guitar, brew beer, and sing baritone with The Citations, yale's graduate a capella group.
thomas.reznick@yale.edu
Rachel Rothschild
Rachel is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the History Department and in the History of Science and Medicine Program. Her academic interests include the history of earth and environmental science, international history, and environmental history in the 20th century. She is writing her dissertation on the history of acid rain in Europe, examining the scientific studies and diplomatic negotiations undertaken to address the problem. Her work analyzes how scientific consensus was reached on acid rain, the use of scientific expertise in forming environmental policies, the role of intergovernmental organizations and nongovernmental organizations in securing international agreements, and the development of legal instruments to provide a framework for countries to seek mutually agreeable solutions to transboundary air pollution.
During the 2012-2013 academic year, Rachel will be conducting archival research in the United Kingdom, Norway, France, and Belgium. Her dissertation project has received generous support from the American Meteorological Society, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She is also the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and intends to seek ways for her scholarship to find wider application among government officials and the public.
Prior to Yale, Rachel earned a B.A. in History of Science from Princeton University, as well as certificates of study in Environmental Studies and Creative Writing. After graduating in 2008, she worked on international and environmental legal issues with a law firm in Washington, D.C. for energy corporations, foreign embassies and the federal government.
For many years Rachel spent much of her time figure skating, eventually becoming a member of Team USA and winning the senior national championship in synchronized skating as a member of the Haydenettes. When she is not studying, you will likely find her tearing up the ice while dancing the paso doble or argentine tango.
Robin Scheffler
University of Chicago, B.A.
Robin Wolfe Scheffler has undergraduate degrees in History and Chemistry from the University of Chicago and an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge. His general area of interest is the history of the 20th century (especially interwar) American biological sciences, with an emphasis on the intellectual, institutional, and cultural processes through which a previously scattered series of fields became a (relatively) coherent whole. He has also worked extensively on the history of interwar science in England, especially at Cambridge. His work aims to foster an ongoing dialog between the History of Science and Cultural and Intellectual History.
robin.scheffler@yale.edu
Vreni Schoenenberger
Vanderbilt University, B.S.
Originally from Western New York, Vreni has spent much of her life bouncing around warmer locales before landing once again in the Frozen North. She received a B.S. in Bioethics from Vanderbilt University, where she was an Ingram Scholar. As a result of the field work opportunities the latter provided, she developed a keen interest in the interplay between secretariat-mediated international health NGOs and the localized experience of such work, particularly within the framework of global bioethics. After leaving Vanderbilt, Vreni worked for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health before arriving at Yale. Her research focus remains cemented in the global context, with a proposed dissertation focusing on the historical relationship between United Nations agencies and the nutrition industry. Vreni plans to pursue a career in the international health sector upon completion of her PhD, as she is simultaneously working towards a secondary degree in global health.
vreni.schoenenberger@yale.edu
Paul Shin
Cornell University, B.A
I am an intellectual and cultural historian of early national/early republic US and the Atlantic world, particularly in the intersections between science and medicine ca. 1750-1850. At the moment, I focus on surgery in the US and the ways it shaped the intellectual, epistemological, and cultural milieu of American physicians (who, as I hope to show, often practiced surgery); and more particularly how the 'hand-craft' of surgery was both a positive and negative source of tension in the formation of a 'modern' American medical profession by the mid-19th century--before the rise of physiology and 'experimental' sciences.Closely tied to this project is a meditation on how medical practice (and American culture generally) was shaped by a specific understanding of the 'natural'--as opposed to the 'normal'--a technical term that arose in mid-century Western medical thought. I draw broadly from methods in American Studies, Art History, Narrative medicine, Narrative history, Anthropology, and hope to incorporate visual (portraiture), material (anatomical specimens), and literary sources.
More broadly, I am interested in the dialectic between the 'natural' and 'cultural' in US history. I am also a second/third year medical student, and see my work as part of a larger project of understanding how medical education and medical research shapes professional identity in ways positive and negative.
paul.shin@yale.edu
Richard Sosa
Williams College, B.A.
richard.sosa@yale.edu
Ying Jia Tan
University of California, Berkeley, B.A; Stanford University, M.A.
yingjia.tan@yale.edu
Courtney Thompson
Harvard-Radcliffe College, B.A.
Courtney Thompson graduated from Harvard College in 2009 with an A.B. in History of Science, a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and a language citation in French. Her senior thesis project examined both popular and medical photographs of human abnormality, including conjoined twins and limbless individuals, in mid-to-late-nineteenth century America. She is interested in the history of the body, history of psychiatry and psychology, history of gender and sexuality, monsters and monstrosity, and the place of visual culture in science and medicine, particularly in 18th and 19th century Europe and America. Courtney is particularly interested in politics and practices of representation in medicine and popular culture, and the ways in which such representations can be used to (re)produce or transform the abnormal body or mind.
courtney.thompson@yale.edu
Heather Varughese
Stanford University, B.A.; University of Texas, M.D.
Heather is from Dallas, Texas, but has spent so much time in the Bay Area that she likes to claim California as home, too. She majored in Human Biology at Stanford University, went to medical school at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and completed an internship in internal medicine at Northwestern University. Heather's dissertation, "Practicing Physicians: The Intern & Resident Experience in the Shaping of American Medical Education, 1945-2003," explores the history of graduate medical education reform, and focuses particularly on house officers' efforts to change the way physicians are trained in the U.S. Other research interests include the history of patient advocacy, and the intersection of medicine and religion.
heather.varughese@yale.edu
