Princeton University

Angela Creager studies the history of 20th-century biomedical research, with special interests in the history of molecular biology and in the role of materials and model organisms in science. Professor Creager graduated from Rice University with a double major in biochemistry and English (1985) and completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry (1991) at the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed an interest in the history of biology. Supported by postdoctoral awards, she retrained as a historian of science at Harvard University and MIT, and joined the Princeton History Department in 1994. Her first book, The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965 (2002), shows how a virus that attacks tobacco plants came to play a central role in the development of virology and molecular biology. She is also the coeditor of three books. Professor Creager has twice been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the Program in History of Science. She is also affiliated with Princeton’s Program in the Study of Women and Gender.
 

Professor Creager is currently writing a book about the effects of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s radioisotope distribution program on biological and medical research after World War II.

Professor Creager teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses on the history of science, the history of biology, and the legacy of the atomic bomb in postwar science, technology, politics, and culture. Since coming to Princeton she has regularly taught a seminar in association with the women’s studies program, “Gender and Science,” which considers the historical participation of women in science and takes up feminist critiques of scientific knowledge and practice. In 1998 she received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
 

• “Atomic Transfiguration,” The Lancet 372 (15 Nov 2008): 1726–1727
• “Phosphorus-32 in the Phage Group: Radioisotopes as Historical Tracers of Molecular Biology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (March 2009): 29–42.