The Program in History of Science

For a complete listing of students in the History Ph.d. program, please click here.

For a list of HOS alumni, please click here.

Yael Geller (MD Tel-Aviv University; MA Tel-Aviv University) 
Yael studies the history of psychiatry and medicine, with a focus on conceptual issues at the interface of psychiatry and philosophy. Her research centers on ethical aspects of the rise of biological psychiatry. 

Emily Kern (BA University of Pennsylvania)
Emily studies the history of science and empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the history of the field sciences, international scientific expeditions, and the ways that nationalist discourses can intersect with scientific work. Currently she is working on American scientific expeditions to Latin America in the early twentieth century. 

Wangui Muigai (BA Harvard University)
Wangui studies the history of medicine in America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in how racial identities are constructed and measured in medical, scientific, and public health contexts. Currently, she is exploring turn of the century discourses on vital statistics. 

Ingrid Ockert (BA Oregon State University)
Ingird is interested by concepts of gender and science, technological optimism, and channels of popular scientific communication in the United States. She has recently researched familial patterns of science. Currently, she is exploring the dissemination of science through popular culture in the United States during the Cold War. 

Felix Rietmann 
(MD, Charité Berlin; MSc, Imperial College London; Dr.med., Charité Berlin) 

Felix studies the history of medicine and psychology in 19th and 20th century continental Europe. He is particularly interested in furthering cross-disciplinary discourses that engage with both the humanities and the sciences. Currently, he is working on a study of medical epistemology and a project in the history of childhood psychiatry around 1900.  

Edna Bonhomme [e-mail] (B.A., Reed College; MPA, Columbia University)
Edna Bonhomme received her bachelor’s degree in biology from Reed College and a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University. She has conducted neuroscience research in Oregon. Additionally, she has conducted social science and public health research in Florida, New York City, and Haiti. She is an activist and wants to study 19th century French science, social movements, and North Africa.

Gregory Ferguson-Cradler [e-mail] (B.A., Middlebury College; M.A., Columbia University)
Gregory is interested in exchange and transmission of natural knowledge in modern Eurasia over geographical space as well as across cultural, social and disciplinary borders. His research focuses on understandings of the Caspian Sea in Russian and Persian contexts and how practitioners attempted to acquire and apply scientific knowledge to problems of political and economic importance such as fishing and climate forecasting.

Anthony Acciavatti [e-mail] (B.Arch, B.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design; M.Arch., Harvard University)
Anthony works on the intersection of agriculture, architecture, and urbanism in North America and South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More generally, drawing on his training in architecture and the fine arts, Anthony is interested in techniques of representation and aesthetic judgment within the history of science and technology.

Michael Barany [e-mail] (A.B. Hons., Cornell University;  M.Phil., University of Cambridge; M.Sc., University of Edinburgh)
Michael studies the material and social history of mathematics. His recent articles have explored topics including the visual culture of Early Modern translations of Euclid, the relationship between algebra and geometry in mathematical analysis, Victorian views on the prehistory of numbers and measures, and the ethnography of contemporary mathematical practice. His dissertation investigates the postwar international mathematical community with focus on the diverse users and uses of the theory of distributions in mathematical analysis. More information, including preprints of his articles, can be found on his webpage.

Iain Watts [e-mail] (B.A., M.A. Hons, MMath, University of Cambridge; M.Sc., Imperial College and University College London)
Iain’s main area of interest is in the history of the sciences and medicine in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the history of electricity and chemistry, scientific life in London, and print culture. He expects to concentrate on ‘Galvanism’ in Britain in the years around 1800, especially relating to public scientific lectures and entertainments, electrical medical therapies, and scientific writing in general periodicals.

Adrian Young [e-mail] (B.A. The Ohio State University)
Adrian is interested in the relationship between science, exploration, and empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, he intends to focus his research on the role of physical anthropology within the British imperial enterprise. His undergraduate thesis examined the development of paleoanthropology in the European colonial periphery.

Hannah-Louise Clark [e-mail] (B.A. Hons, University of Oxford; A.M., Harvard University)
Hannah-Louise's research interests lie in the global histories of allopathic medicine and pharmaceuticals in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on North Africa and the Middle East.  She is currently working on the subject of medical assistants and subordinates in colonial Algeria and Morocco.

Henry Cowles [e-mail] (B.A. Harvard University)
Henry is interested in the transatlantic history of ideas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, he hopes to explore the relationship between certain schools of thought (ecology, evolutionary biology, pragmatism) and ideas about the human/nature boundary in Progressive Anglo-American thought.

Ksenia Tatarchenko [e-mail] (B.A. Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University; MA University Paris-Sorbonne)
Ksenia first began studying history at the Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University. She holds a Masters degree in History from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Ksenia's dissertation entitled "A House with the Window to the West: The Akademgorodok Computer Center, 1958-1993," is a transnational history of scientific computing and the development of computer science in the Soviet Union through a case study of the Akademgorodok Computer Center in Siberia.

Daniel Trambaiolo [e-mail] (BA/BSc, University of Sydney; Ph.D., University of Cambridge)
Daniel's main research area is the development of new traditions in Chinese medicine during the Song-Jin-Yuan-Ming transition (c. 1100-1400). He is also interested in Korean and Japanese uses of Chinese medical ideas and practices, and in the history of biochemistry in twentieth-century China, including the crystallographic structure determination of insulin during the Cultural Revolution.

Victoria Lee [e-mail] (B.A. Hons,  MA, University of Cambridge; M.Sc., Imperial College London)
Victoria's research centers on the science of fermentation as part of applied biology in Japan. The science links together brewing, wartime butanol production, antiobiotics and process biotechnology. She is interested in the interactions between Western science and indigenous industry, between science and the modernizing state, and between science and the Japanese business model.

Margaret Schotte [e-mail] (B.A. Harvard University; M.A. University of Toronto)
Margaret is interested in the intersection of history of technology and print culture in the early modern transatlantic world. Formerly a rare book cataloguer in New York, NY, she hopes to undertake a comparative study of 17th-century French navigation manuals.

Robert MacGregor [e-mail]  (B.A., B.S. Rice University)
Robert’s research centers on Soviet cosmonautics in the first half of the twentieth century and the early Soviet and American space programs. Robert is also concerned with the rise of science fiction as a literary genre and its relation to early space pioneers and science in the Cold War.

Donna Sy [e-mail] (B.A., B.S., Stanford University; M.A. Univ. California, Berkeley)
Donna is interested in 17th-century European scientific and medical publishing, especially in the Elzevirs and their associates, the origins of the printed scientific/medical anthology, and associated processes of textual canonization in the early modern period.