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Joanna Radin, PhD

Associate Professor of History of Medicine
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About

Titles

Associate Professor of History of Medicine

Biography

Joanna Radin (Associate Professor) received her PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of biomedical futures who cares about how people in the past imagined how science, technology and medicine would change their lives. This has led her to think and write about global histories of biology, ecology, medicine, technology, and anthropology since 1945; history and anthropology of life and death; biomedical technology and computing; feminist, Indigenous, and queer STS; and science fiction.

All of these themes are present in her current book project, which reconsiders the history of science through the career of Michael Crichton.

She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017), the first history of the low-temperature biobank and co-editor, with Emma Kowal of Cyropolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017), which considers the technics and ethics of freezing across the life and environmental sciences.

Appointments

Other Departments & Organizations

Education & Training

PhD
University of Pennsylvania (2012)
MS
University of Pennsylvania (2007)
MS
Cornell University, Communication (2004)
BS
Cornell University, Communication (2002)

Research

Overview

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

Bioethics; Biomedical Technology; Cryopreservation; Death; Epidemiology; Ethics; Expeditions; Global Health; History of Medicine; Infectious Disease Medicine; Medicine in Literature

Publications

2019

2018

2017

  • ’Digital Natives’: How Medical and Indigenous History Matter For Big Data
    Joanna Radin (2017) Osiris.
    Peer-Reviewed Original Research
  • Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World
    Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (eds) Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2017
    Peer-Reviewed Original Research
  • Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood
    Joanna Radin (2017) Chicago: University of Chicago Press
    Peer-Reviewed Original Research

2016

2015

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